Can the Candidates Possibly Understand Small Town Voters?

CitizenSugar — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 07:57:51 -0700

I heard rumblings of the big Obama "bitter" comment all weekend and was about to dismiss it as a woefully insensitive characterization but relatively harmless tongue-trip — until I read the rest of the statement. At a closed door fundraiser in San Francisco last week, Obama said this of Pennsylvania voters reeling from job losses and broken political promises:

“[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.”

To me it's not so much that he characterized the working class as gun-toting, bible-thumping, bigots — it's that he attributed those proclivities as a misguided response to very real challenges that rural voters are facing. The statement levels charges in my mind that Pennsylvania voters (in this instance) aren't politically sophisticated enough to understand the cause-and-effect of their circumstance. Are we to believe then that if a worker in Pennsylvania gets laid off his reaction is to hate people who "aren't like him?"

I'm not alone in my objection to Obama's notion. To see how,

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Can the Candidates Possibly Understand Small Town Voters?