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"Well, he's not running for sociologist in chief, he's running for president."

By Ann Althouse

On "Meet the Press," Bob Shrum articulated a potential new meme about Barack Obama. The subject, of course, was Obama's statement that small-town people "get bitter" and "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."

Mike Murphy picked up Shrum's "sociology" theme:

The--one of the big vexing things for Democratic elite is how to hell do working-class whites ever vote Republican? We give them all the class warfare stuff, but they still seem to do it. Well, they do it on culture. And the Democrats, many of them, look at this like some sociological disease to be explained away. And Barack, sitting in some $10 million backyard had to explain it like a sociologist...

For Murphy, unlike Shrum, "sociology" was not a way of encapsulating and setting aside a stray musing, but evidence of a central problem of Democrats: They're out-of-touch and elitist.

Shrum reworks his meme:

And I think he was explaining what was going on with a lot of those folks. Now, should he have said it that way? No.... People go with sociology, and he shouldn't be a sociologist.... People--sociology says that when people are in distress, when they're economically deprived, they, they hold onto the things in their lives that give them some sense of security and identity. That's faith, that can be hunting, that can be all of those things.

Sociology says.... Obama was only saying what the experts know, right? But it was not a good idea to say it when you need these people to vote for you.

James Carville stammers into the fray:

I'm just, I'm just saying that in--culturally, he, he, he, he--I know he's not sociologist in charge, but that he didn't have his kind of history right. He needs to have a better history and a better understanding. I think--and I think Bob is right, he's going to have a chance in the debate, and he's going to have a chance to, to, to kind of re-explain himself here. But this statement was really off in terms of his--its, its, its accuracy and understanding who "these people are." They're--they'll--there's a large segment of the Democratic Party that would like to win an election without these kind of white, working-class voters, and we need a substantial...

I think he's about to say that real Democrats can't stand those people Obama was talking about. Shrum talks over him and prevents him from going deeper into that hole.

Full post as published by Althouse on April 14, 2008 (boomark / email).