onegoodmove

Best "New Rules" in a while. Thanks for posting this.

Sometimes Bill says it exactly right. I don't like him interpreting Obama's comments as saying people use religion, guns, etc. as a crutch because I don't think that's what Obama said (although, personally, I'm not saying it's not true) but, the rest - spot on!

Normally i'm not a huge fan of Maher's monologues, just cause sometimes they can be a little cliched, but this one was absolutely spot on. I think it was Maher who also said something along the lines of "what's wrong with an elitist president? shouldn't your leader be better then you?" and as far as bitterness goes, sic semper tyrannis.

Jill's right, Obama didn't mean that people turn to God or start hunting because they're frustrated by the fact that the political system doesn't work, he was saying that people turn to God, guns, and immigration as political issues because other political issues are not working for them.

Of course as an empirical matter Obama was wrong. The white working class he was talking about is actually not that poor, in fact they're higher than the median income on average. And it's actually affluent Americans more than poor Americans who vote on cultural issues. It's called post-materialist politics or New Politics, and the dynamic has been understood for a long time. The current data do not bear out the idea that economic deprivation of a white working class kind leads to economic conservatism.

There are ecological fallacies all over the place here. We see that the South is poor Christian, predominantly white and conservative. But if took away the Christian whites the median income wouldn't be that poor. It's poor blacks who, by and large, make the South as poor as it is, and the middle class whites who make it conservative. Wealth is an aggregate or average figure, while elections are decided by majority vote.

Of course Obama, like many liberals, wishes that the poor were even more liberal or even more pro-Democrat than they already are. Fair enough, but fulfilling that wish means doing things to help those people directly, rather than 'clinging' to this standard liberal canard which both Obama and Hillary seem to believe (or have believed in the past).

Funny New Rules.

Thanks for the interesting post dende blogger.