It's A Pickup, Not A Pitchfork
Irradiated by LabRat
So in the wake of the Scott Brown roflstomp of Democratic legislative ambitions in the Senate, the leftist and “progressive” pundits are in the throes of an apocalyptic episode of Chicken-Little tantrumming. Never to be left out, here we have Keith Olbermann and Howard Fineman mulling over the REAL reason for the Brown victory, which obviously cannot possibly be that the Democrats have used their massive majority for massive incompentency and corruption and Americans are kind of pissed about it. No, it must be that blue Massachusetts has had a sort of allergic reaction to the President they went 26 points for in 2008 and turned racist. And you can tell because there was “coding” in the Brown ads that involved pickup trucks. I hate watching Olbermann too (and for the record I have no more stomach for O’Reilly than I do for him), but it comes in the first bit of the video.
To recap, in case you didn’t watch it or just couldn’t quite believe what you were hearing: Massachusetts voted for the white guy over the white chick because the Scott Brown ads featured pickup trucks and that was secret visual code for “we’re not okay with having a black guy in the White House.”
Originally I asked Stingray if he wanted to do this post, seeing as how it seemed like the kind of material that inspires him do those berserker profanity binges that he’s so artistic at, but he just quirked his eyebrows at me and pointed out the obvious, which is that trying to spin this as a race thing is just so incredibly stupid and pathetic it’s impossible to really get angry over. And, really, he’s right. This is just the spastic kickings of someone who finds it completely impossible to admit to himself that His Team, led by His Guy, is doing kind of a crap job right now and that large numbers of Americans are recognizing that and are upset about it- and not about some other thing, like race, that would make it totally not His Team’s fault and them just Bad Bigoted Americans.
I have to give Fineman a small shred of credit- but not a whole hell of a lot, since he said “that’s a good question” rather than “are you serious”- in that somewhere in his bizarre pickup truck ramblings he manages to more or less land on the truth, which is that the pickup isn’t a racial message but a class message to a pretty big demographic that doesn’t trust the urban elite ruling class that Washington is largely composed of.
What he fails to mention, of course, is that this demographic has an excellent reason not to trust that class and that he’s sitting next to a really good example of why. Rural and suburban proles don’t have pickup trucks to tote around their crosses, lighter fluid, and lynching victims, they have them to tote around the tools and materials with which manual labor is done, and the fact that Olbermann apparently can’t even wrap his head around that enough to connect it to work and to class rather than attach it as a nebulous symbol of a racist “underclass” is a picture-perfect illustration of why they don’t trust him and the governing class he represents.
What’s especially sad about this is that non-white people own pickups too, lots of them. If you live out in the sticks or have a job that involves manual labor or are just in an economic bracket where doing your own dirty work makes sense (and that includes educated pasty us), then having a pickup truck is really handy. They’re ubiquitous on the Indian reservations and among the Hispanic working class out here, and might even have become a racial symbol in that sense if so many white people didn’t own them for the same reasons. I don’t live in a state with a large black population, but I suspect the same is true among black people in not-completely-urban areas in Southern states.
Barack Obama is impossible to picture in a pickup truck, but that’s not about the color of his skin, it’s about his class. His educational credentials are Ivy League, and so are his wife’s. They may be darker than past Presidents, but they came from the exact same culture as the entrenched governing class. If the Pickup People can make the distinction between class and skin color more easily than Keith Olbermann can, that says a lot more about Olbermann than it does about them.
Personally I think Brown’s victory had a hell of a lot more to do with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid than Barack Obama, but if you want to make it about him, at least get it right.
January 20th, 2010 at 4:59 pm
Well put. The barely submerged idea seems to be that pickup owners are all redneck cousin-humpers.
Barack should go to Shiprock. But I doubt that he ever will.
January 20th, 2010 at 5:07 pm
I usually don’t politi-comment since we’re pretty far apart on the spectrum, but I would like to point out that even my bleeding heart liberal self would feel comfortable throwing a tire iron directly into Keith Olbermann’s face. I think the pickup truck argument is bullshit (WTF, Olbermann) but, that said, I also agree with Nate Silver’s assessment (via 538) that Martha Coakley’s loss probably had more to do (or at least just as much to do) with Martha Coakley than with Barack Obama or congressional leaders. Democratic favorability has fallen markedly over the past year or so, for a variety of reasons (many of which I’m sure we disagree on) but the fact stands that even with a ten point or more swing, a Democrat probably shouldn’t have lost MA. That said, a Democrat who campaigned on a platform of bringing something to a state which it already had (why the hell should MA care about universal healthcare?) and then acted completely out of touch with the vast majority of working class voters (read: do not fuck with the Red Socks in Boston) was probably screwed regardless of the overall political climate, and I doubt the current distaste for the incumbent party really helped.
January 20th, 2010 at 5:21 pm
Yeah, Keith Olbermann doesn’t represent “liberals” to me, he represents a particular breed of overweening rich urban asshat. He and David Brooks are in the same basket, and Brooks is at least theoretically a conservative.
You’re right in that Coakley really deserved to lose, but the thing is that normally in Massachusetts even a very bad candidate will win as long as they’re the right party; it’s why her party on both the state and national level wasn’t screaming at her to get her ass in gear and campaign until it was too late. Neither she nor they thought she needed to, and then when she did it turned out she was really terrible at it.
January 20th, 2010 at 9:36 pm
It was really about taxes and policy… and the lousy job Coakley did…
January 20th, 2010 at 11:43 pm
Your Pravda is old, Labrat.
The new Pravda is that MA voters elected Brown because they were angry that the public option was missing from the “health” bill.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/20/obama-backers-more-commit_n_429673.html
The Kos/Huffpo answer to how to achieve Democratic victory is that they need to turn even harder to the left to win.
Keep fucking that chicken, Kos kiddies.
January 21st, 2010 at 8:08 am
I don’t live in a state with a large black population[.]
Now that is a masterful example of understatement.
—-
I’m trying to figure out the ironic bumper sticker slogan for this idiocy.
“This Pickup Means I’m Secretly Racist”
January 21st, 2010 at 9:33 am
Well said LabRat. Unfortunately, as Kristopher illustrates, these people are so close to the ‘Let them eat cake.’ mentality that they can never understand that we regular folks don’t need or want their interference in our lives and that Brown’s win was a sign of that. Plus how long can they try to fall back on the ‘racist’ card? It’s totally been overplayed.
January 21st, 2010 at 11:00 am
Yep…pickup trucks are only owned by Evil White Male Rednecks. (I should go next door and tell my Native neighbors to sell their F150, I guess.)
Wow, did they sprain anything when they made that leap?
January 21st, 2010 at 2:12 pm
I’m appropriating “roflstomp” (which, by the way, would make a great band name).
This looks like a self-reinforcing feedback loop. Dems propose something paternalistic in a well-meaning patrician sort of way. Proposal is reviled as a condescending straitjacket. Dems, hurt and bewildered by the ingratitude of the huddled masses, conclude that we really don’t know what’s good for us. Dems build more and stronger paternalism into their next well-meaning proposal. 50 GOTO 10.
January 21st, 2010 at 4:11 pm
KO exhibits a painful level of extra chromosomal Down’s-Syndrome wannabeism - in a feedback loop of his own.
January 21st, 2010 at 5:34 pm
Stolen from Ace.mu.nu:
And now, for even more doubling down on stupid, Nancy Pelosi is making noise about passing it anyway, via Senate-House reconciliation, to avoid Scott Brown’s vote disrupting this crap.
From the comments:
11 No… please please please not again….. ARRRRRRRRGGGHHHHHHHHH s-s-s-s-stop f-f-f-f-f-f-f-fucking m-m-m-m-m-me p-p-p-p-p-please
Posted by: The Chicken at January 21, 2010 06:48 PM (ffV1/)
January 21st, 2010 at 6:46 pm
You know bluntobject…. I was going to say “GOTO?” What the heck uses “GOTO” anymore? That’s like a 1970-something coding model…
then the reference made perfect sense.
January 21st, 2010 at 11:45 pm
Hmm. Patrician paternalism considered harmful. I like it.
January 22nd, 2010 at 1:06 pm
They can’t even tell when it’s time to stop with the chicken. Once you slam the drawer on its neck, and it stops twitching, you’re done. Anybody who keeps on after that is just perverted.
January 22nd, 2010 at 3:47 pm
Reminds me of a Cambridge liberal (wife of a friend) who asked snidely on a long- ago visit to NM whether the ranchers carried guns in their pickups “to keep power over the Chicanos”. When I reminded her that Spanish and Indian cowboys also had guns she replied “to defend themselves against the Anglos?”
I started spluttering and Dutch Salmon, whom you may know, said “They all use ‘em to shoot coyotes”.