Former President Barack Obama blamed his lack of “connection” with conservatives on Fox News and radio host Rush Limbaugh.
“I ended up getting enormous support in these pretty conservative, rural, largely white communities when I was a senator, and that success was repeated when I ran for president in the first race in Iowa,” Obama said during a virtual gala for the nonprofit organization PEN America, Tuesday night. “By my second year in office, I’m not sure if I could make that same connection, because now those same people are filtering me through Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and an entire right-wing or conservative media infrastructure that was characterizing me in a way that suggested I looked down on those folks or had nothing in common with them.”
Obama continued: “Part of what changed is that, back then, if I went into a small town in southern Illinois, I could probably visit the local editor of the newspaper, who might be a conservative guy with a bow tie and a crew cut, probably doesn’t have much use for Democrats, generally, but was somebody who adhered to journalistic norms, was curious, was interested, believed in facts. I could sit down with that guy, and he might write an editorial saying, he’s a young liberal kid from Chicago, but seems sensible, had some good ideas. And so, that’s how people were receiving me — with a different set of assumptions than they would today. It’s yet one more example of how the connections that I may see, because I experienced them in my own life, may get harder to make if we’re only understanding people through our phones and our screens, and we’re not having the face-to-face conversations where, by virtue of that conversation and experience, we can recognize ourselves in each other.”
Obama was participating in the gala to accept the PEN America Voice of Influence Award for the “the power of his soaring words, the promises he has unlocked in our nation, and the enduring American values that he has embodied.”
The 44th president’s latest book, A Promised Land, hit shelves last month and has been widely praised by legacy media, including by the New York Times, which referred to Obama as “as fine a writer as they come.”
During the press tour for the book, Obama blamed Fox News and Rush Limbaugh for creating the “sense that white males are victims.”
“What’s always interesting to me is the degree to which you’ve seen created in Republican politics the sense that white males are victims,” Obama said during an appearance on the radio show The Breakfast Club. “They are the ones who are under attack, which obviously doesn’t jive with both history and data and economics. But that’s a sincere belief that’s been internalized. That’s a story that’s being told. And how you unwind that is going to be not something that is done right away. It’s going to take some time. And the story that they’re hearing from Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and, in some cases, inside their churches, is that Democrats don’t believe in Christmas, only care about minorities and black folks, and are trying to take your stuff and trying to take your guns away.”
