C’mon Andrea — NBC lets you drop by the set of MSNBC from time to time, so you don’t say things on the NBC Nightly News such as this:
NBC’s Andrea Mitchell on New Year’s Day made it clear to Nightly News viewers that her Obama-loving network will continue using the race card to assist the current White House resident’s reelection.
In a brief segment about Iowa, Mitchell said “the rap” on the Hawkeye state is that “it doesn’t represent the rest of the country — too white, too evangelical, too rural.”
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Barack Obama’s Bitter Clingers remark, captured on video by an all-too-rare enterprising Huffington Post contributor while the presidential candidate was speaking to an elite group of fellow members of the far left at a San Francisco fundraiser in April of 2008 was perhaps his ultimate Kinsleyesque gaffe in 2008. It helped to further illuminate his elitist worldview, trashing religious moderate Pennsylvania Democrats (moderate in the sense that they supported Hillary over Obama) during a period when he was cynically trying to use religious rhetoric to advance his campaign. As Mark Steyn wrote in his recent book After America, Obama “subsequently ‘apologized’ for his remarks by explaining that “I said something everybody knows is true:”
Well, maybe at a swank Dem fundraiser in California—and, if that’s not “everybody,” who is? This was an even more revealing remark than the original bitter-clingers crack. It deserves to be as celebrated as the famous response to the 1972 election results by a bewildered Pauline Kael, doyenne of the New Yorker, that nobody she knew voted for Nixon. Just as “everybody” knows “we can’t just keep driving our SUVs, eating whatever we want, keeping our homes at 72 degrees,” so nobody we know voted for Nixon and everybody we know agrees that those crackers are embittered fundamentalist gun-nut bigots. Oh, c’mon, I said something everybody knows is true.
Does Andrea Mitchell qualify as “everybody?” Presumably, when she wanders over to the set of MSNBC, she’s looked as providing balance — beltway establishment old left, as opposed those on the channel who have openly expressed their socialist worldviews on the air or are legendary racial agitators. But she certainly sounds in perfect agreement with Mr. Obama’s punitive view of the America that exists outside the confines of Hyde Park, San Francisco and the Hamptons.
Related: “Speaking of Andrea Mitchell’s life inside her Pauline Kael Bubble, it goes way back,” Sissy Willis tweets in response to this post.
– S.F. was still holding out hope for Senator Clinton back then. Don’t expect any further disclosures from the likes of Puff Ho. New parlor game: figuring Mitt will obtain the nomination, what is the press-media complex withholding with which it will sandbag him after the convention? To start: his religion or worthy yet insolvent enterprise Bain didn’t save?
Like most Leftists, Andrea has a narrow view of things. Which is to say that Iowa is no less representative than the tiny bubble that Andrea herself inhabits. So, using her “logic,” if Iowa is not a qualified arbiter of political fortunes then neither is Andrea qualified to comment. What she doesn’t understand is that life in Iowa is just as valid as life in her native Bronx or inside the Washington beltway.
One thing folks like Ms. Mitchell ought to keep in mind–or should be kept in mind by the politicians of the cause she supports. It is not in the nature of man to accept permanent functional disenfranchisement if he neither wishes to nor must. It therefore seems to me that in the long term, it would be an extremely poor electoral strategy to both try to gain power by appealing mainly to ethnic or national heritage groups while at the same time trying to always automatically discredit members of what is today the largest (and will probabably always be the largest such group), whenever they don’t vote your way. In other words, live by ethic groups, die by them—especially if you make it clear to the largest that they have no hope if having respect under you, ever, or of being give the same chance to have their say without being shown contempt–simply because of the color of their skin.
Personally, I would prefer it if we could just all be Americans. We are not there yet, for just as I will not classify based on race, neither will I accept classificiation.