I sometimes have a hard time knowing what Maureen Dowd is about, but help me here: is she also interpreting Barack's comments in a distorted way? I can't tell. She says this:
Behind closed doors in San Francisco, elitism’s epicenter, Barack Obama showed his elitism, attributing the emotional, spiritual and cultural values of working-class, “lunch pail” Pennsylvanians to economic woes.
But then she also has the line
... he has maintained a regal “What do the simple folk do to help them escape when they’re blue?” bearing, unable to even feign Main Street cred.
Which is more in line with how I interpreted Barack's comments but in a snarky insulting way meant to comment on him negatively. So I'm like, does she get it, or does she not?
Okay, here's how I interpreted Barack's comments.
When I was in college I interned in Ethiopia. There are, as you know, seriously poor people there, and one thing that was clear was that they went to church a lot. A whole lot. Twice a day. They could have next to no possessions, and still make it to prayers without skipping a beat. The conversations I had with UN employees was that this was a basic habit of the economically desperate, a behavior that could be seen all over the world: for some reason, in times of serious economic woe, they became more religious than ever. And of course, we the foreigners were treated with complete disdain. We watched an outdoor service. The driver of the company car would translate for us, explaining how the priest urged them to beg and blame the rich, the powerful, and the wealthy foreigners in their country making money of their backs. In short, the desperately poor went to church a lot and increasingly despised those "others" who were different from them and seemed to be taking their opportunity.
An extreme example, I'm sure, but it was the example that I guess this contributed to how I interpreted what Barack was saying. In the field in which I worked, it was just given that poverty led to, yes, more "clingy" religious behavior. But that doesn't mean all religious behavior was due to poverty... yet that seems to be how some people are interpreting it, and it just riles me. I go to church every sunday myself. Barack himself is a religious guy. How can people even interpret it that way? How can Hills say he's demeaning religion when he's obviously religious?
I mean, what I heard from Barack's speech was "the poor turn more desperately to certain traditions in the face of serious economic woes" but what I hear too many people turning it into is that "certain traditions are only the result of poverty and bitterness." You know? It's the same but different. "Clinging to religion in the face of poverty" and "Going to church only because you're poor..." ugh I'm beginning to confuse myself but you get the difference, right?
Oh, her column was frustrating in another way... the "end game," the fact that this is going on forever, the fact that she seems to believe that Barack is unable to seal the deal. It made me more desperate to just pick up the phone and make calls.