Blabbering Bill Clinton, bless him, has rescued Barack Obama from the “working-class Pennsylvanians are bitter” rap. Or he did 17 years ago, rather. It was revealed today by the Huffington Post‘s Nico Pitney that in September 1991 Clinton said pretty much the same thing that Obama has been taking heat for when he referred to blue-collar bubba voters as “all these economically insecure white people who are scared to death,” in a September 1991 Los Angeles Times article.
Which is more insulting to a typical Pennsylvania blue-collar Reagan Democrat — being called “scared to death” or “bitter”? Isn’t it more manly to be bitter than scared? I would probably feel better about “bitter” if I was a rifle-owning, gay-marriage-hating, churchgoing Pennsylvania union guy.
In November 1991 Joe Klein, writing for the Sunday Times, reported that Clinton made the following remarks: “You know, he [George H. W. Bush] wants to divide us over race. I’m from the South. I understand this. This quota deal they’re gonna pull in the next election is the same old scam they’ve been pulling on us for decade after decade after decade.
“When their economic policies fail, when the country’s coming apart rather than coming together, what do they do? They find the most economically insecure white men and scare the living daylights out of them. They know if they can keep us looking at each other across a racial divide, if I can look at Bobby Rush and think, Bobby wants my job, my promotion, then neither of us can look at George Bush and say, ‘What happened to everybody’s job? What happened to everybody’s income? What…have…you…done…to…our…country?”