Brouhaha

I saw the headlines, "Barrack Comment Offends Rednecks," "Obama Hates Real Americans," and "Infant Faints After Hearing Obama on Evening News." I expected to find some charged racial remark or perhaps something about free trade. Nope, what I got was:

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 gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then 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.

My immediate reaction? That statement is TRUE!

Sure, he could have picked something nicer than "cling" to be political, but don't we have enough political nonsense in this campaign already? Hearing Barrack say something 1) true, 2) important, and 3) that needs to be said makes me think more of him, not less. But then maybe that's because I'm an evil big city Californian (the worst of the worst). Even though I'm not from the city. Even though all the elitist rich farmers and real estate developers (increasingly the same thing now that small farmers have disappeared) in my home town vote Republican and my Democrat father taught me to shoot a gun and my Democrat grandmother reads the bible while my atheist Republican grandfather rants about the evils of religion. Frustration is leading to run on sentences so I'll stop soon.

One thing I'd like to note - us California suburbanites make fun of rural and urban folks equally. We make fun of militia nuts in Reading and spoiled faux-idealists in San Francisco. Everyone makes fun of LA, and LA makes fun of everyone else. "Real" Americans are no more likely to know how to take care of a farm than they are to get a BMW for their 16th birthday. Jefferson's ideal died 100 years ago - big business, by way of "the free market," killed it.