In one of the stranger moments of the debate, Obama tried to minimise the significance of his ties to William Ayers by saying that he’s also “friendly” with Tom Coburn (!), who has supported the death penalty for abortionists, as if to say, “Look, I’m friendly with all kinds of crazy people, but I’m not responsible for them.”  See, Obama’s just a friendly guy!  But there is a huge difference between expressing a controversial opinion and, well, setting off explosives and killing people, and it is not at all obvious that Coburn’s position is even wrong, much less on par with willful destruction of property.  Indeed, it’s a wacky parallel: one person engages in terrorism, the other person wants to punish what he reasonably regards as an act of murder, and they’re supposed to be equivalent?  Presumably, they are supposed to be comparable because both are “extremists” in different ways, but of course the content of the “extremism” in question makes all the difference in the world, as do the actions of the two men being compared.  This is like the Wright/grandmother comparison in the Philadelphia speech, but much, much more reckless.    

Imagine the implausible case of, say, John McCain being “friendly” with Eric Rudolph.  Could McCain then say in his defense, “Well, I’m also friendly with Barack Obama, who has refused to support protecting infants who have survived abortion procedures, and obviously I don’t agree with him, either”?  Would that make a relationship, any kind of relationship, with Rudolph acceptable?  Now, obviously, Obama is not in any way responsible for what Ayers did or even for what Ayers has said now or in the past, but he is responsible for allying with him in local Hyde Park politics and for serving together with him on the same foundation board.  While his ties to Ayers are much weaker than those to Wright, the key difference between Wright’s blunders, which have been entirely rhetorical, and Ayers’ crimes is obviously that the former are awful but harmless words and the latter are violent and destructive acts. 

It is, of course, inconceivable that a major presidential candidate on the right could get away with having any political associations with domestic terrorists, regardless of how long ago those terrorists were active.  That Obama thinks it reasonable to compare such a terrorist to one of his colleagues in the Senate is striking.  This is a case of Obama’s urge to demonstrate his capacity for bridge-building spiraling out of control.

But this whole controversy should serve to remind people that in this country you are allowed to make fun of “elites” for being cosmopolitan or intellectual or whatever else. Yet if you dare say something about “small town America,” watch out. ~Isaac Chotiner

Chotiner’s observation is correct, though I’m not sure what the point is, except to complain that there is an inherent political advantage in belonging to a larger group of people.  Most Americans live in cities and suburbs, so there are not that many small town Americans in terms of sheer numbers, but there are enough of them that the political consequences of offending or alienating them are much greater than if you take a stab at the much less numerous elites.  Besides, mocking elites is more widespread and widely accepted because it ultimately has no effect on anything and threatens no one.  The elites remain just as they were–on top–and it is mostly a way of letting off steam and venting frustrations.   

Criticisms of small town America, or any other part of America, coming from a  member of the political class is going to rile up some part of the electorate that identifies (for whatever reason, genuine or not) with the people being criticised.  There will also be much more attention paid to any perceived criticism of small town America, because it suits the interests of GOP supporters to portray themselves as defenders of small town America.  As Prof. Bacevich noted, “GOP support for such [social] values is akin to the Democratic Party’s professed devotion to the “working poor”: each is a ploy to get votes, trotted out seasonally, quickly forgotten once the polls close.”  Republican expressions of devotion to “small town America” are doing the same kind of work.  Also, it is throwing a bone to the people who keep voting for them (for some reason), as if to say, “See, we remember that you exist!” 

This is the kind of hollow symbolism that is supposed to make social and cultural conservatives ignore the fact that these Republican elites (that word again!) do not take their issues seriously and have their own priorities.  Meanwhile, most Republican talking heads will gasp in horror whenever anyone on the left dares speak against corporate elites, who are, of course, the “good” kind of elites, because they are the people with whom the GOP is frequently aligned.  When corporate elites are mentioned, the liberal disdain for populist appeals against academia, the media or Hollywood and the like will suddenly be replaced by a ferocious anti-elitism.  This typically entails giving more power to the state, which many on the left pretend is populism, just as many on the right pretend that empty symbolic gestures constitute cultural populism.

So if it’s “elitist” or “insulting” to note that voters who are otherwise left behind in the global economy sometimes have misdirected frustrations – which can be exploited for political gain – then Barack Obama has plenty of company. ~The San Francisco Chronicle

Yes, he does have plenty of company–a majority of the Democratic Party, if polling is any indication.  Obama has plenty of company, and this is a serious problem not just for Obama, but for all those in the party who agree with what he said. 

The Chronicle reminds me here of something Obama was saying in his Philadelphia speech last month, which goes to the heart of the charge of his condescensing attitude: some people have correctly directed frustrations (i.e., they blame the right people or institutions for their plight) and some have misdirected frustrations.  Resentment about affirmative action is displaced economic anxiety; the answer isn’t to change or eliminate affirmative action, but to rally white voters against corporations and lobbyists.  Likewise, frustration with a broken immigration system and mass immigration isn’t actually about national sovereignty, border security, demographic change or anything actually connected to immigration–it is fear of the Other that fills the void that a job would otherwise fill.  Never mind that people who have work and economic security oppose mass immigration, often more fervently and actively than those who have some immediate economic interest at stake.  The entire issue is written off as “anti-immigrant sentiment,” xenophobia, an irrational fear.  This is the essence of the claim: liberals have values and convictions; conservatives have neuroses.  This is what we have come to expect from the left, but Obama fans were insistent that their candidate was different.  I have never been persuaded that this was true, and the claim is even less credible now.    

Naturally, in the Chronicle’s and Obama’s telling, it is whites and cultural conservatives who have misdirected frustrations, which fits with the critique of conservatism from the left, which holds that pretty much all of conservatism is one big exercise in misdirected frustration, usually boiled down (most simplistically by the Krugmans of the world) to that “antipathy to people who are not like them.”  Perhaps it is not terribly surprising that a liberal thinks cultural conservatives come up with the wrong answers, since he presumably believes that their cultural conservatism, at least in its political expression, is wrong, but it strikes me as significant that there is an assumption shared by Obama and the Chronicle that the attachments and attitudes Obama mentioned can apparently only be understood as a form of scapegoating and distraction.  Obviously, what the Chronicle refers to mockingly as the “horrors of globalization” or an immigrant “invasion” very well could impinge directly on the economic interests of small town Americans and might have an obvious, relevant connection to their economic predicament.  Since it is taken for granted among most coastal and urban elites that opposition to these things is the function of ignorance and prejudice, it simply can’t be that these issues might resonate with voters displaced by “creative destruction.” 

What seems more significant, however, is that voters in many of the communities most adversely affected by mass immigration might very well be less prone to vote on the basis of immigration policy than voters elsewhere.  There may also be cases where small towns that have been hollowed out by offshoring and deindustrialisation have been so battered that they now welcome any new factory or business, even if it employs large numbers of illegal immigrant workers.  Having destroyed their means of support through bad trade policy, Washington has made these towns dependent on the import of foreign labour to keep their towns from collapsing all together, and so perhaps perversely traps those worst affected by these wrongheaded policies into accepting them as inevitable.  Indeed, one hears quite often the argument from the left and from pro-immigration Republicans that voters in border states are supposedly less concerned about immigration than people in the center of the country who are just experiencing the first waves of immigration in the last decade or so, as if this made the current policy (or rather lack of a policy) more justifiable.  One also hears the critique that working class and black voters, who undeniably are negatively affected by mass immigration, don’t care about immigration as much as middle-class whites.  If these claims are true, Obama’s analysis is that much more in error and should then be seen as little more than the laziest of stereotyping.  Arguably, the people who are most likely to be most concerned with these areas of policy are those who fear or anticipate negative effects from these policies in the future; the communities that these policies have already gutted or transformed beyond recognition may have more immediate and pressing concerns than struggling against policies whose repeal or alteration will now do them little good.  It’s not at all obvious that the places that have been “left behind” are more attached to any of the things Obama mentioned than those that have not.

Update: Looking over the Rasmussen numbers on reactions to the remarks, what is striking is how few people outside of the 18-29 age group agree with Obama’s remarks.  Among 30-39, those who disagree outnumber those who agree by two to one (50-24); in the 40-49 group, the breakdown is 64-19; among 50-64 year olds it’s 58-26; in the 65+ group it’s 59-20.  (The remainder of each group is “not sure.”)  Not only is it not the case that “everybody” knows what he said to be true, but the public seems to disagree with him overwhelmingly.  Even young voters, one of Obama’s core demographic groups, are split evenly, 40-40.  Interestingly, it is the oldest voters who are least likely (39%) to say that the comments reflect an elitist view, while young voters are more likely than some of their elders (48%) to say this.   

Update: Fortunately, nobody except the elites care about this controversy.

Ross adds an important point to the recent backandforth over prosperity and religion:

I would also add that you can usually tell when religion-infused political movements have emerged in response to economic frustrations, because such movements tend to include (unsurprisingly) a strong economic component – from the Thomas Muentzer-inspired peasants’ revolt of the 16th century down through the Christian populism of William Jennings Bryan to the variations on liberation theology that you hear from (ahem, Mr. Obama) many African-American churches today. And the fact that the agenda of post-1970s religious conservatism (what Andrew describes, frequently and inaccurately, as “fundamentalism”) does not include a strong economic component ought to suggest – at least to informed observers, a category that apparently doesn’t include the leading Democratic contender for the Presidency – that “economic frustration” has very little to do with its appeal.

This is right, but I would push this a bit more.  Even in the cases where a religiously-driven or infused political movement did adopt a certain kind of economic platform, be it corporatist, socialist, populist or what-have-you, the economic agenda was derived from and justified in terms of the religious mandates that the members of the movement believed they were obliged to observe.  Whether it was Bryan’s fundamentalist Populists (and here the label fundamentalist is perhaps somewhat more appropriate), Catholic and Christian Democratic parties in Europe, Social Gospel progressives in the early 20th century or, on a more idiosyncratic and individual level, Tolstoy’s support for the Social Democrats in Russia, their political and economic programs grew out of their already-existing faith and their conviction that charity and justice required a certain kind of social and economic order.  Attachment to religion did not emerge out of alienation and frustration, but provided the language and the concepts for responding to injustices or frustrations.  These are cases where people who already embraced their religion to one degree or another set about trying to apply their faith in the political sphere. 

It is also worth bearing in mind that religiously-inspired political movements that focus on economic questions are in many cases focused on economic policy as a way of talking about broader questions of distributions of power and status or as a way of expressing an aspect of religious identity, so that even when there are concrete complaints about the distribution of wealth, monetary policy, the power and influence of financial interests, regulation (or deregulation), labour rights, and so on, they may contain within them expressions of cultural norms and values derived from religion beyond the merely rhetorical.  For example, parties representing political Catholicism in Europe typically supported social welfare and pro-labour measures because of Catholic social teaching, but also as an expression of solidarity with fellow Catholics whose interests were served by such legislation and as part of a more general reaction against the entire agenda of liberal parties that were themselves usually steeped in fierce anticlericalism and anti-Catholicism.  Political Catholicism had an economic agenda, but that agenda was just one part of a much broader program of defending the interests of the Church and Catholic communities against the predominantly urban liberals of their day who held Catholic beliefs and institutions in the same contempt that Obama’s San Francisco audience probably holds the small town citizens of Middle America.  

Political mass mobilisation of Christian voters is above all an expression of confidence in the validity and relevance of their faith to contemporary political debate.  It is almost the exact opposite of the embittered coping mechanism that Obama’s remarks seem to describe.  It is often an effort to push back against intrusions on their way of life or the education of their children, and these intrusions are usually sponsored by those who favour an activist role for government; the effort is in many ways defensive, or it is understood as being defensive, a reaction against the kinds of cultural changes cheered and promoted by activists on the left.  The most glaring error in Obama’s remarks is what he failed to mention (understandable, I suppose, given where he was): the role that cultural liberals had in provoking the dissatisfaction and defection of conservative Democrats, and their contribution to creating the climate that made them regard the leaders of the Democratic Party as the enemies of so much that they valued deeply.  Of course, these voters regarded them this way because those leaders had made a point of acting that way.  The charge of “elitist” is probably overused, and it may be a mistake to treat every kind of elitism the same, but it didn’t come out of nowhere and it was not just something cooked up by party hacks and radio show hosts.  The populist language that conservatives have employed for the last 30 years, even though it seems and often is so starkly at odds with many GOP policies, resonated because urban liberals in media, academia and government did insult and condescend to Middle Americans.  What really bothers these urban liberals is not so much that they think small town Americans “cling” to religion or any of the rest of it, but that they resent that these people often “cling” to the GOP in election after election.  This seems inexplicable to such folks, who are convinced of the obvious rightness of their views.  At the core of their misunderstanding–which you can see expressed in the cries of bewilderment on the left over the attention that is being paid to these remarks–is the assumption that people must choose between their pocketbook and their culture.  You don’t have to be a cultural conservative (or at least I don’t think you have to be one) to see that forcing people to make that choice will lead them to choose culture every time, and if this isn’t obvious the gap between urban liberals and everyone else is even greater than I had imagined.  Even assuming it is true that Democratic policies are better for small town Americans (or anyone else for that matter), the Democrats will always be on the losing side of this fight if they insist that economics must always take priority over culture, and especially if they insist that cultural issues should preferably be excluded from the discussion all together.  A party that could take seriously both economic populism and cultural conservatism would be the majority party for a generation, but the respective elites of bothparties are deeply threatened by such a prospect and will work to prevent it.  Because culture will trump economics, the party that gives priority to the former (even if it is only through symbolism and rhetoric!) is going to keep performing well at the polls despite a track record in government, particularly in recent years, that ought to reduce it to minority status for decades.   

None of this is to deny that there are real economic grievances and anxieties, especially in the Midwest and the Rust Belt, but I would just point out once more that there is nothing in Obama’s proposals that seems particularly likely to remedy them.  Indeed, if you believe that one of the fundamental problems with the economies of many Midwestern and Rust Belt states is the high cost of doing business caused by state and local over-regulation, which has discouraged investment and employment, electing Obama might be quite detrimental to the economic interests of working and middle-class Americans in these states.

Roger Simon reminds us that empty, faux populist gestures are what running for President is “all about.”  Indeed they are, and this ought to be a cause for despair for everyone who is actually interested in decentralising power away from Washington and having a government that represents the citizens.  Simon also reminds us of the fundamentally fraudulent nature of the entire process, in which we pretend that the oligarchs that vie for preeminence at our expense have something in common with us, so that we can reconcile ourselves to investing an incalculable amount of power in the hands of some mediocre politician by maintaining the fiction that he works for us and is really just like us.  Joe Sobran observed years ago something to the effect that the grandest monarchs of the past had to make tremendous efforts to engage in pomp and propaganda to build up the grandeur of their relatively very weak position, while modern democratically elected leaders have to pretend to be an ordinary schlub to obscure the fact that they possess more power than demigods.  Meanwhile, as second-rate lawyers compete to rule the world, we pretend that we have become more free in the modern era.

Reihan writes a typically smart entry for The Atlantic’s Current, and he identifies an important part of what Obama was attempting to do at that fundraiser:

But it resembled the sort of rhetoric that Obama does best: His armchair sociology, to put it harshly, was about building a bridge between so-called “coastal elites” and the toiling masses of the heartland, by making the former see the world from the latter’s point of view. It is just as easy to imagine him trying to explain the views of gay rights activists or, say, Jeremiah Wright to an audience of ardently traditional working class whites.

Quite right.  He was trying to explain those small town folks to the audience of coastal liberal donors.  I have to say once again that this is a terrible idea.  I would add that if Obama was supposed to be representing the “toiling masses,” he did a pretty bad job of it, since the impression he probably left with the San Franciscans was not just one that reinforced their pre-existing prejudices about “flyover country” but probably turned their regular dislike of small town people into a kind of pitying contempt.  “Oh, those poor Pennsylvanians, they know not what they do!”  Worse, it almost certainly confirmed them in the faith that sufficiently activist government that would “help” these people would remove the conditions that lead to all this unpleasant “clinging.” 

If the “middle of the road” person is in danger of getting run over, the self-appointed builder of bridges runs a frequent risk of being knocked off balance and falling into the deep and dark chasms below.  Some would call this effort courageous, but as a matter of winning elections and as a matter of advancing a policy agenda, which is surely more important to the candidate and his supporters than fostering intra-national understanding, it is fairly crazy.  But it is not just a tactical mistake to be engaged in an endless round of conversation-starting and negotiations between different groups of voters.  It draws attention to what will, in fact, be the least attractive aspects of Obama’s style in the general election.  First of all, there is the endless pursuit of consensus and unity, which makes some sense in a legislature but can be positively crippling in an executive position.  Different blocs of voters have their own interests; they are competitors for government largesse, government protection or the government’s benign neglect.  Generally, I think they don’t want to understand the other blocs, and don’t want to have other blocs explained to them.  An executive who does not pick favourites and choose sides ends up being feared and loved by no one, but distrusted by all.  Besides highlighting another episode where Obama’s own supporters seem intent on destroying him through their own misguided enthusiasm and good intentions, justifying the ways of small town America to the wine and cheese set exemplifies a couple of other problems with Obama’s campaign.  One is that it puts him into his academic, meta-candidate role, where he talks about his campaign as a kind of prism for understanding American society as if he were a pundit commenting on his own candidacy, and the other is that it conveys the impression that his campaign (and, if he won, his administration) would be a long, drawn-out graduate seminar in which the Professor holds forth on various subjects on a regular basis as a way of spurring on “dialogue.”  That definitely appeals to a certain kind of person, which is why Obama wins college grads and post-grad degree holders by gigantic margins.  For everyone else, it inspires the kind of dread and boredom that I sense in my students when I use the word uxorilocality. 

Patrick Deneen has written twoexcellent posts highlighting the underlying problem with any effort to justify the ways of the people in Middle America to the elites.  Prof. Deneen writes:

I was trying to point to the absurdity of the idea that Obama would say these things, that a Democratic front-runner, if asked how to explain about those folks living in big cities, would frame his response as one in which we could justify their beliefs in terms of a kind of economic determinism. So, imagine people in the heartland asking a Democratic frontrunner to explain their pro-choice position, saying something to the effect “I have to hold this position in spite of my personal beliefs because the elites of the party, who are our biggest donors, live in an economic condition in which the obligation to carry children of accidental pregnancies to term would prove to be economically inconvenient and a limitation on their personal freedom.” This would be a moment of extraordinary frankness of just the kind that Obama demonstrated in San Francisco – and just imagine the response if that statement, made behind closed doors in Latrobe, were to get out in the same way the San Francisco comments got out. But – here’s the point – it’s a kind of moment one musn’t remotely expect, because the current set of assumptions is that we explain the beliefs of people in Latrobe in light of the assumptions of the people in San Francisco (or New York – don’t get bent out of shape, Susan!), and not vice versa.

This has to do with the political consensus that accepts the desirability and sustainability of “progress” and perpetual “growth,” which go unchallenged even by most small town folks, because they are just as caught up with the promises of progress and growth and they are bitter or dissatisfied that the fruits of that growth have not extended to all.

Someone needs to protect Obama from his defenders, especially from Jack Cafferty:

They call it the Rust Belt for a reason.  The great jobs and the economic prosperity left that part of the country two or three decades ago.  The people are frustrated.  The people have no economic opportunity.  What happens to folks like that in the Middle East, you ask?  Well, take a look.  They go to places like Al Qaeda training camps [bold mine-DL].  I mean, there’s nothing new here. 

Sometimes I think that the people who want to stop Obama from getting the nomination should just get out of the way and let his defenders and supporters keep talking and writing.  Whether it’s Roger Cohen talking about Obama’s Indonesian lessons or Cafferty mentioning Al Qaeda recruits in the same breath with voters in the Rust Belt (presumably as a way of complimenting the latter: “They may be bitter, but at least they haven’t started trying to blow things up!”), Obama’s defenders seem intent on compounding his difficulties and making his candidacy radioactive.  Never mind that radicalised recruits for terrorist cells tend to be the alienated well-educated professionals from fairly comfortable family backgrounds–who thinks bringing up Al Qaeda is such a great idea when talking about dissatisfied Pennsylvanian voters?  Meanwhile, you have to marvel at Cohen’s split-minded claim that Clinton’s reference to her own family heritage is an indirect slap at Obama, as if most people would have any way of knowing that his mother was a “secular humanist” or his stepfather was a Muslim without Obama’s supporters constantly dredging up details of his family life, and then he can turn around and offer fulsome praise for the Builder of Cultural Bridges and incessantly remind his readers of Obama’s Muslim ancestors without batting an eye.  He seems to think that repeatedly mentioning these things in a very widely-circulated newspaper helps his candidate.  It really doesn’t.

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 [bold mine-DL]. ~Barack Obama

Not to beat this topic into the ground, but I want to focus on this last part of the quote, because it seems to me that this is the crucial part that makes some sense of what Obama was trying to say.  There are now a couple of pro-Obama arguments circulating around out there that try to make this statement complimentary to small town Americans or simply a statement of electoral realities.  According to the former, Obama is saying that small town Americans fall back on valued certainties and traditions (this conveniently ignores the bits about being racist and anti-immigrant) because they have been ignored and neglected by Washington.  No doubt they have been ignored and neglected by Washington, but note what Obama actually said: these people cling to all these things “as a way to explain their frustrations.”  How does clinging to religion explain their frustrations?  The sentence doesn’t make a lot of sense, unless you read it as a claim that people “cling” to religion because of frustrations with their economic woes.  But that isn’t why people hold fast to their religion.  This implies that these people would not “cling” so tightly to such things if their economic situation were better.  According to the second argument, Obama was engaged in a bit of analysis of why small town Americans vote a certain way on religious and cultural issues.  In this view, perpetually neglected voters whose economic interests are ignored start voting on such issues because they have no expectation that either party will serve those interests.  This is not just a claim that socially conservative working and middle-class voters support the GOP on symbolic and cultural issues rather than voting their economic interests, which is the simple Thomas Frank thesis, but that both cultural issues (including views on immigration), racial attitudes and protectionist attitudes are a function of a lack of representation in Washington and that voters “cling” to these things (including racism) to cope with being ignored by the political class. 

This actually has a rather paternalistic ring to it: the nanny state failed to pay enough attention to the kids voters, and now they are acting out with their racism and anti-immigrant sentiments.  But Obama is there to reassure the San Franciscans: “Don’t worry.  They’re racist and xenophobic, but they don’t really mean it.  It’s just a phase they’re going through because we haven’t been giving them enough attention.”  The more you think about the statement, the greater the condescension seems.  The implication is again that the “clinging” attachment to these things is a product of alienation from Washington, rather than recognising that the voters already valued these things or had these attitudes (though I would certainly not describe them as Obama did) and Washington and/or the cultural left proceeded to intrude upon or insult them on the one hand or promote mass immigration and de-industrialisation on the other.  Besides the positive reasons to value guns and religion, the strong attachments to these things expressed in voting are partly a backlash against efforts to regulate gun ownership, drive religion out of the public square, flood the country with cheap labour and send manufacturing industry out of the country, and they are partly earlier attachments that are being threatened by the kinds of policies that Obama supports.  On literally none of the things that actually causes the frustration Obama identifies (it is the only thing he correctly identifies in this sentence) does Obama offer a serious alternative to his competitors.  He may not be an elitist, but he is content not to challenge his party establishment on any of the things that are alienating these voters from Washington and from both major parties.    

Update: Michael Lind has a good article on this topic, and especially here when he paraphrases Obama’s claim:

They may not be racists, they may even be sympathetic victims, but they are too irrational to understand their genuine problems and their true interests, which are chiefly economic, a fact that university-educated progressives in big cities and college towns can readily perceive.

And he quotes Todd Gitlin, who says Obama “did indeed fall into the Tom Frank vulgar Marxist trap of seeming to say that love of guns or religion (or antipathy, even) is merely derivative, not fundamental.”

Noah Daniels Powers Boothe returns as the voice of the McCain campaign in a second television ad that refers vaguely to policy initiatives that sum up McCain’s plans with a series of adjectives (“Taxes: Simpler, Fairer; Energy: Cleaner, Cheaper”) and absolutely no details on what McCain would actually do.  I believe he is also against crime and likes children.  The ad promises that these initiatives will “ignite our economy.”  Igniting the economy sounds like something a pyromaniac central banker would try to do.  It is probably not the best phrasing.

SUSA has a poll from Harrisburg, PA gauging reactions to Obama’s San Francisco remarks.  Most remarkable is that Hispanics were the group most offended by the comments.  47% of Hispanics (admittedly a small portion of the respondents) said they were offended, compared to 40% of whites and 26% of blacks.  In all of the talk about Obama and the “white working class” (a phrase that has started to become a kind of shorthand for the voters who have problems with Obama), the damage to Obama among a lot of other demographic groups is probably being ignored or underestimated.  Conservatives were the most offended of all (53%), but 34% of liberals and 28% of moderates said the same.  50% of all respondents said they disagreed with the comments, and 40% of all found them offensive, so for the most part if the remarks were poorly received they were very poorly received.  Disagreement was predictably greatest among older voters, gun owners, regular church-goers and conservatives, but substantial numbers of every age, ideological and party group disagreed as well, including 37% of liberals and 41% of Democrats.  On the whole, those who say that this will have a long-term negative impact on Obama’s campaign are roughly equal in numbers to those who were offended, but since so many were offended, including many Democrats and independents (33% and 39% respectively), that suggests that there probably will be a long-term negative impact on his campaign.  This seems to matter in a way that the association with Wright has not yet seemed to matter, because it was Obama speaking this time and the mistake could not be blamed on a crazy “uncle.”