Obama did not make the sale in Pennsylvania

Carrie Budoff Brown:

Stephanie Gill, a bartender in a white working class neighborhood in this Rust Belt city, noticed the shift immediately.

A week ago, her customers at Rauchut’s Tavern in Tacony didn’t have much to say about Barack Obama. But when she returned to work Wednesday, a day after the Illinois senator attempted to quell the furor over his pastor’s racially incendiary remarks, the reaction inside the corner bar was raw and unapologetic. “People are not happy with Obama,” Gill said. “It’s the race stuff.”

Obama has always been a tough sell in largely white Northeast Philadelphia and in the city's blue-collar river wards, a collection of white ethnic enclaves where customers at the local watering hole are often born and raised in the neighborhood that supports it.

And his speech Tuesday, although widely praised by the pundit caste and Obama supporters, has only seemed to widen the gulf with the Budweiser class here.

More than a dozen interviews Wednesday found voters unmoved by Obama’s plea to move beyond racial divisions of the past. Despite baring himself with extraordinarily personal reflections on one of the most toxic issues of the day, a highly unusual move for a politician running for national office, the debate inside taverns and beauty shops here had barely moved beyond outrage aimed at the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Obama’s refusal to “disown” his longtime pastor.

A day after the speech, local residents were left wondering whether Obama was candid in the last week when he said he hadn’t heard any of Wright’s most objectionable remarks, but then said Tuesday that he had heard “controversial” remarks while sitting in the pews.

“He lied to Anderson Cooper,” said Rodica Mitrea, an aesthetician and immigrant from Romania, referring to an Obama interview Friday with the CNN anchor.

...

“I don’t want to hear that you are blaming us for him saying this,” said Peter, who is white and worked at an auto parts factory until it was shuttered several years ago. Cutting ties with the church “would have been the best way to do it. That way, I could have been able to listen to him again.”

...

These voters in Pennsylvania get it even if many in the media do not and Brown does a good job of capturing their reaction to Obama and his Wright problem. Wright's rage, his bigotry and racism, his paranoia was not something these white voters in Pennsylvania were responsible for. They did not give him the absurd idea that the white government invented aids to exterminate blacks, or pushed drugs to destroy them.

This kind of scapegoating and avoidance of responsibility cannot be excused by just saying you don't agree with everything the man said. Scapegoating is what bigots do and there is no excuse for accepting it. By trying to shift the ownership of irresponsible actions to others people like Wright do their flock no service. By trying to shift the ownership of Wright's bigotry to others, Obama does himself no favor.

His speech may have played well to his media base, but people like these in Pennsylvania saw "Wright" through it.