Obama: 'It's politics' not race
Posted: Tuesday, April 15, 2008 2:40 PM by Domenico Montanaro
From NBC/NJ’s Aswini Anburajan
WASHINGTON, Pa. -- Don’t read Clinton’s “elitist” attacks as racist Obama cautioned a voter at a town hall meeting with veterans and military families.
An older man, taking the mic for the first question, claimed Clinton’s attacks were trying to cast Obama as an “uppity” Black man.
“This isn’t political whatsoever, myself being obviously a white person, this term is the way it’s being used against you isn’t far from ‘uppity,’” the man began. “Okay. And I think the Clintons are getting away with something that they must be called on. They will continue to do this until somebody states, ‘Mrs. Clinton you’re really close to prejudice here. This is wrong. This man does not have anything elitist about his upbringing. He never will, and I desire a well-educated person as president of the United States. I am sorry. It’s got to stop.”
Obama disagreed and said it was not about race, but chalked it up to politics. “I don’t think there are racial overtones going on to the attacks right now. I think it’s politics. This is what we do politically, when we start getting behind in races, then we start going on the attack.”
He went on to say he found it amusing to be called an elitist, since he was raised by a single mother and had been on food stamps as a child. He said his wife Michelle had also grown up in a working-class home -- with two parents who did not go to college and held blue-collar jobs.
“We both had to finance our entire college, our law school educations, borrowing money, and we paid off our student loans about five years ago or six years ago,” Obama said. “You know we lived -- for the first 13 years of our marriage, up until three years ago, in a three-bedroom condo without a garage. So if you live in Chicago, it means you’re scraping ice every morning,” he joked.
He labeled the back and forth about his comments as a sign that the campaign is in “political silly season.”
“Hopefully it will come to an end fairly soon,” he said, “and we’ll start focusing on the issues that the people of Pennsylvania and the American people really care about.”
