Globally Rational

For those of you who haven’t been following the US election, Obama recently said the following (click here for the full transcript); some are calling it “Bittergate”:

The truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of 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 to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Suddenly, people started complaining that he thinks Pennsylvanians are “bitter”. I had thought, until now, that we were past the point of the media taking words out of context… all he really said was that people can get bitter if they’ve had job trouble for the last 25 years and the administration has ignore them. He’s trying to address those people and say that he wants to help them, but some of Hillary’s supporters are attacking him over what seems like nothing. It’s sure as hell not as big of a deal as Hillary’s blatant lie about Bosnia, which they dismissed as “misspeaking”. Apparently, it’s OK for Hillary to lie, but it’s not OK for Obama to use one imperfect word (as she showed once before when he used the word “denounce” instead of “reject”, even though “denounce” was actually more logically correct in context).

That aside, I have a more interesting note: why is it that we add “gate” at the end of every political scandal now? Watergate didn’t have anything to do with water (it was related to the Watergate building in DC), so why was Clinton’s sex scandal dubbed “Monicagate”? It seems that the media is running out of ideas… they can’t find any real problems with Obama, so they take a small word out of context and add “gate” to the end so that it sounds more important. Was Bittergate really as bad as Watergate, or even as bad as Monicagate?

Imagine what it’d be like if we made a big deal every time President Bush misspoke and said something like ““Wait a minute. What did you just say? You’re predicting $4-a-gallon gas? … That’s interesting. I hadn’t heard that.” (Feb 28, 2008).

EDIT (5:34 pm CST): Apparently, the reason why Bittergate hasn’t hurt Obama in the polls is because working-class Pennsylvanians don’t really disagree with him.

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