I have always had a scene from the 1992 movie Sneakers in my brain. In the scene, Robert Redford has been captured by his former friend and fellow computer hacker, played by Ben Kingsley. Kingsley has a plan that will wreak havoc on the financial system. At some point Ben Kingsley’s character notes that while the reality might be different, the general public would see the perception of catastrophe as reality and continue the work that he started and end up destroying the financial system.
Perception is reality. That has stuck in my mind.
The comments uttered by Senator Obama is the past few days has me thinking about perception becoming reality. I’m not going to wade into the battle of what he meant, but I am interested in how it will be perceived, and I can tell you that his words will be used by Republicans come November.
The Democrats have had a problem over the last 30-40 years: that problem is that they are perceived as out of touch elitists. Of course, the GOP has milked this for all it’s got, but the Dems have, time and again, put up candidates that appear to not identify with the average Joe. The exception to that rule in the last few decades was Bill Clinton, who was able to turn the tables on the GOP and portray himself as the guy you want to have a beer with, while George H.W. Bush was viewed as an East Coast elitist.
One of the slams against Obama has been that he can only appeal to upscale whites and African Americans, something that Hillary Clinton has said and John McCain will say if Obama is the Democratic nominee. So, that being said, Obama has to appear to understand the working man’s plight and not say anything that seems to be condescending. In my opinion, regardless of what Obama meant, he appeared to do just that in his talk.
And to make matters worse is where he said them: in San Francisco, the place that some might see as the bastion of upscale liberalism. His words and where they were said were a ready-made commercial for some conservative 527 group.
In his recent speech on race, Obama was able to speak to some of the frustration that the white working class felt. He did it with charm and grace and it was probably one of the best speeches ever made. He made that speech in Philadelphia, a city that had a large black and white working class population and also was the birthplace of our nation. It was all smart, from a media perspective, which makes his latest remarks all the more astounding. The words were not chosen with care, and the result is this mess.
Again, I’m not here to determine if what he said was condescending or not. What matters is that it is appearing that way. It’s up to Obama and his media team to come up with a way out of this.