Dan Drezner has an amusing post that goes over several of the possibilities why the "bitter" quote has had, well, no effect at all on the race. Really, it hasn't. Obama's still got a big national lead and he's still close in Pennsylvania if most of the polling is to be believed. I'd say the explanation is partly that elites are out of touch, but also partly that the extended primary season has gone on for so long that voters have become desensitized to being shocked, SHOCKED every time a candidate says something poorly phrased. Think about it: it's easy to get angry every time a candidate says something moderately offensive if the race lasts two months, but if the race lasts sixteen months you stop giving a damn about these things. I wonder if this isn't an argument for the long primary season: people hear about the flag pin and Jeremiah Wright a million f-ing times and just don't care. That doesn't seem to stop talking heads from bringing them up, which leads to the "out of touch elites" argument that Obama might want to make at some point because the media sure isn't going to declare itself as out of touch, and the idea that the media is ultraliberal ought to be on its last legs following the ABC debate last night.
I didn't watch the debate, just like I haven't watched most of the debates this cycle. I know what policies Clinton and Obama favor, I voted for Barack Obama in the California Primary two months ago (it seems like much longer than that) and all of the various "controversies" that Obama has been plagued by have been unimpressive to me (as well as to most people, it seems). There is no real reason for me to watch a debate between Obama and Clinton, as I've picked my horse and debates are supposed to illuminate differences between candidates' policies, which are minor. I hear the debate was pretty terrible--half of it was devoted to cataloging the various "controversies" that nobody aside from the gossip-reporting-as-politics Beltway types and conspiratorial right-wingers (groups that seem to have more overlap than originally thought) seem to think is relevant. Does anyone really think that Obama having once received support from one of the Weathermen is really going to make Democratic voters say, "That's it! I've had it! I'm voting for Hillary!"? It is therefore, definitionally, an unimportant question. Well, that's not true, it's important so that right-wingers who have already decided that they dislike Obama can hear that he was (tenuously) associated with a former radical so that they can have their existing prejudices reinforced. And I don't mean racial prejudice necessarily (though there undoubtedly is much of that) but prejudice in the general sense: these folks have already decided that Obama is a) a Muslim, b) a radical liberal, and/or c) unpatriotic.
The right-wing press, of course, isn't about journalism but about continually feeding the seemingly boundless sense of resentment and paranoia that has come to define the right wing far more so than any commitment to small government (as if!) and keeping people in a perpetual state of outrage and helplessness so that they turn out to the polls so that the GOP can save them. The mainstream media has become, either wittingly or unwittingly, a part of this open conspiracy to try to gin up class conflicts and paranoid delusions to distract from their disastrous policies. The promise of Obama is to transcend these politics, and the first step is to start trusting other people instead of assuming that everyone who disagrees with you is acting based on insidious, hidden motives. Obama has always done that, and people have responded to it. That's why the William Ayers flap will gain no traction, just like the last dozen right-wing manufactured "controversies" haven't. Obama listens to his opponents and assumes they are arguing in good faith, and talks about why he disagrees with them. Many on the right are so consumed by a lifetime of perceived slights and an all-encompassing cynicism that they don't see that Barack Obama is such a different and unique figure in the history of contemporary American politics. They just don't get it. They only want to win, and they don't care how they do it. Here's hoping that the Democrats control everything after this election so that the Republicans become irrelevant for a while. It'd be good for the country and good for the Republicans, too--it's amazing how a spell in the wilderness does wonders for finding one's self. Just ask Thoreau.
