I remember well his negative comment about Americans that cling to their bibles and guns.
No, you don't. You remember a "Chinese Whisper/Telephone" game of the comment and it's one reason it's good for all of us to keep quotes handy. Our bias will tend to distort the truth. It's human nature. For instance, it's likely that your disdain for Obama has led you to buy into the Muslim nonsense, if not whole hog and rationally, then at the back of your process. Why? Because you substituted "Bible" for "religion" in the actual quote.
Then you did it again:
This old Sissy is proud to be one that clings to her bible and gun.
Here's the actual quote in its full, irritating display of feathers:
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
It was a sophomoric way to say it, but he's speaking about people who need to feel a sense of collective strength and who have watched the promises of "fixers" come and go while it dwindled. They will tend to lean on collective institutions and look for a boogeyman to serve as the culprit. That boogeyman may take the form of a conspiracy of people (new world order) or a race, a religious group, a political ideology, but it's human nature to put a face on their frustration.
Here's what he had to say about the response later,
"...the underlying truth of what I said remains, which is simply that people who have seen their way of life upended because of economic distress are frustrated and rightfully so. People feel like Washington's not listening to them, and as a consequence, they find that they can only rely on the traditions and the things that have been important to them for generation after generation. Faith. Family. Traditions like hunting. And they get frustrated."
Obama's problem was that like many intellectuals he did and likely does look down on the little guy a bit. Even if it's not a conscious bias, it's in play, the way a lot of people have a less than willfully directed, deliberate racist attitude, while holding demonstrably hostile assumptions about those outside their own. The same hostility you can observe within divergences relating to faith and between differing religions. It's a reason for everyone to really reflect on what they believe and how they speak to it.
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