A true, but dumb comment
I suppose every politician is entitled to one dumb comment during a campaign, and Obama's comment about the "bitter" voters in small-town Pennsylvania--secretly recorded by a blogger who somehow got into an event closed to the press- is his. Even if it is quite true.
Here's what he said:
"You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are going to regenerate and they have not. So it's not surprising, then, that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
If he'd just stuck to the last two--anti-immigrant and anti-trade sentiment--it might not have been an issue. Think of Hazleton, Pa., and its anti-immigrant mayor, and think of just about any union rally in the state you ever might have attended. But guns and religion? He was probably thinking about diehard National Rifle Association members and their sometimes paranoid beliefs, not recreational hunters who are quite happy to purchase one gun per lifetime rather than per month. Or he may have recalled Thomas Franks' book, "What's the Matter with Kansas?", in which the author talks about how people in Kansas were convinced by rightwing politicians and fundamentalist preachers that "moral" values were more important than good jobs and benefits.
Whatever. I lived in one of those Pennsylvania small towns, Shamokin, for 12 years and can tell you that folks there harbor a lot of anger when it comes to their lousy economic situation. More than a few people fervently believed that the local Chamber of Commerce worked to keep jobs out of Shamokin so as not to push up wages at their own businesses. When people seek to explain the unexplainable, they often turn to conspiracy theories.
I watched a little bit of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama at the Compassion Forum at Messiah College last night (some rare favorable press for the school). Clinton was so boring and churchy that I nearly turned it off. Obama was far more engaging, but I still abandoned him at 9 p.m. for "The Tudors" on Showtime, my current guilty pleasure. But I did TiVo the whole thing, so I can finish watching him tomorrow as the final week of campaigning for the Pennsylvania Primary begins.