{Minor edits for grammar.}

For full disclosure, I am an Obama supporter, I feel he is the best candidate both in terms of electability and in terms of actual ability to do the job. I’ve watched his campaign with interest and rising enthusiasm. All of that said, I think people have to recognize that his statements in San Francisco, saying that working class people are “bitter” and so “cling” to their guns and their religion, has been a giant misstep. It was a gaffe pure and true, and he is paying the traditional price: Time spent off-message, defending and responding rather than proposing and advancing.

A lot of what he says is true, nonetheless, and if you read the context, you will see that his major sin is choosing words that can be taken many ways. And hey, it’s politics, and politics ain’t a tea party. His opponents can, and probably should, use this to their advantage in an attempt to define him for America. That doesn’t mean that I agree that his remarks were “elitist” and “talked down” to working class America. But it’s McCain’s right, or Clinton’s right, to make that case.

Obama’s main problem was his choice of the word “cling”:

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. So it’s not surprising then that 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.

This would all have passed without notice if he had chosen his words better. For example, if instead of saying people “cling” to guns or religion, he could have said they “fall back on” guns and religion — the things in their life that they can control, that give comfort and surety. Why didn’t he? To be honest, because it is all too easy for a Democrat to fall into language that dismisses such beliefs as tools of cynical manipulation. Here’s the bigger question: Why is it so easy? Because for a generation and a half, one party (the Republican party) has used those beliefs as tools of cynical manipulation. Appeals to patriotism, to gun ownership, to faith, are easy and cheap and — if the record of the Republicans is any guide — meaningless.

The truth of that lies in the speed and tone of the response from both McCain and Clinton. They piously promise to protect the little guy, they publicly feel umbrage for him, they pat him on the head. They don’t speak to the concerns that Obama did, the reasons that he thinks that middle America might be “bitter”. They don’t offer any actual solutions for their distress. Instead they facilely promise to somehow recover every job that’s been lost.

Obama missteps because he tries to speak about the plight of the working class without having been a member. He doesn’t get the lingo. Fair enough. But the other two nominally-major candidates go much further. They celebrate their false membership in the working class. They too have never belonged but they appoint themselves to feel the outrage of the class.

In the end, in my opinion, that is condescending — that is “talking down” to the working class.

I’m sure that this is going get me marked as a rabid Obama supporter (which I am not). But I can’t help but gush over his impressive response on the issue of church and state. In an interview with BeliefNet, he was asked, “You wrote in The Audacity of Hope about the role that faith and faith-based programs could play in confronting social ills. Isn’t your view on that similar to George W. Bush’s?”

His answer — the clearest ever seen — follows below the fold.

No, I don’t think so, because I am much more concerned with maintaining the line between church and state. And I believe that, for the most part, we can facilitate the excellent work that’s done by faith-based institutions when it comes to substance abuse treatment or prison ministries…. I think much of this work can be done in a way that doesn’t conflict with church and state. I think George Bush is less concerned about that.

My general criteria is that if a congregation or a church or synagogue or a mosque or a temple wants to provide social services and use government funds, then they should be able to structure it in a way that all people are able to access those services and that we’re not seeing government dollars used to proselytize.

That, by the way, is a view based not just on my concern about the state or the apparatus of the state being captured by a particular religious faith, but it’s also because I want the church protected from the state. And I don’t think that we promote the incredible richness of our religious life and our religious institutions when the government starts getting too deeply entangled in their business. That’s part of the reason why you don’t have as rich a set of religious institutions and faith life in Europe. Part of that has to do with the fact that, traditionally, it was an extension of the state. And so there is less experimentation, less vitality, less responsiveness to the yearnings of people. It became a rigid institution that no longer served people’s needs. Religious freedom in this country, I think, is precisely what makes religion so vital.

I get goosebumps just reading it.

So Senator Obama has generated some heat by making the following remarks:

I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.

(I’m quoting them from here.)

And a tempest has blown up in the Democratic party by some progressives that Obama should be shunned for having “praised” Reagan. Of course if you read the remarks, he didn’t actually do that. He did point out that Reagan was transformational — that the Reagan presidency moved the political stance of the country in a way that, say, the Clinton presidency did not. This statement is from praise. It’s a recognition of fact. The proof is below the fold.

As a quick example, take the following comment posted on firedoglake, ironically intended to show we should pillory Sen. Obama:

Dems have been out of power so long, even they forget what ‘centrist’ means. Right now, the center of the Democratic party is closer to what the center of the Republican party was in the 1970s. Run and govern as a damn liberal already!

Someone earlier had said,

Yea, Jane!!! We are the agents that drag the Overton Window to the Left!!!

And all I can say, it’s about damn time!!!

without noticing, apparently, the fact that shifting the Overton Window was in fact what Sen. Obama was talking about — clearly, Reagan was more successful at this than Clinton, if only because two decades later we are still bemoaning that ” the center of the Democratic party is closer to what the center of the Republican party was in the 1970s” even after Clinton’s eight years.

I don’t know why so many people seem to be missing the point. Perhaps it’s because Reagan was transformative, and now he’s become the bogeyman of the progressive movement. People apparently can’t be rational about him anymore. I am not yet an Obama supporter but this “controversy” is pushing me that way, because it highlights that he seems to be the only one who will speak to us as if we’re not stupid — as if, being adults, we can understand nuance and thus accept uncomfortable truths, such as that a president can be very effective in effecting change even if the changes he effects are bad ones. (Of course, the rabid sputtering on Obama’s left flank provided evidence that, no, the American electorate is in fact as stupid as everyone complains.)

I understand the need for mythmaking and crafting a progressive narrative to combat the conservative one. But aren’t we supposed to be the party of the reality-based community?