I’m sure by now you’ve all heard about the remarks Senator Obama made about small town Americans. As the weekend wore on for me, I watched it get twisted and over-analyized to the point of meaninglessness. This happens every time a candidate makes a statement that is even the least controversial, but oddly does not happen when more troops die in Iraq. Strange. Anyway, I digress.

Here’s a part of the entire quote (Huffington Post has the whole thing in audio form and a longer excerpt here)

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. 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. 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.

This was made public late on Friday, and every time I turned on any station that was in any way affliated with news, it was being discussed. Frankly, I’m sick of even hearing about it. But I wanted to get my two cents in, so let’s do this and then move on with our lives. Maybe focus on some real issues. Like how to make people less bitter and more hopeful. That’d be nice, wouldn’t it?

I grew up in a small town. I have friends and family that still live in small towns across the midwest. So, even though I’m writing this from my comfortable, lofty perch out here on the left coast, I know what I’m talking about. From my experience, on the whole, people where I came from are more bitter, they are clinging more and more to guns and religion and are more untrusting of immigrants and yes, even government.

Growing up, I remember laughing at The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and In Living Color with my dad. My mom taught me that everyone was equal and that it’s wrong to judge others by the color of their skin. We had family friends who were Hispanic and one of our other close family friends had a son who was gay. My folks helped his folks come to terms with it after he came out of the closet. My parents certainly aren’t perfect, but they’re good people.

I encouraged a couple of migrant students to join the football team when I was in high school. I drove them to and from practice when they couldn’t get a ride. Sometimes, I really didn’t want to, but my parents made sure I did, because it was the right thing to do. I wasn’t perfect, but my parents tried their best to make sure I grew up to be a good person.

Now, when I talk to my folks, my mother is more and more religious and closed off. My dad talks more and more about Mexicans taking people’s jobs and they are both bitter. They have reason to be. My mom works two jobs, my dad has had trouble getting a decent job and does a lot of freelance steel work around town to get by. It breaks my heart to hear these people who were so open and accommodating when I was a kid grow into bitter stereotypes. That’s not who they really are.

The town I grew up next to has rows and rows of shiny, new empty houses that no one can afford and no one is moving there to buy. Jobs are harder and harder to come by, houses and farms are being foreclosed on everywhere and that grizzled, kind-hearted farmer I grew up down the road from is now a greeter at Wal-Mart or works at Burger King to make-do.

These people have been ignored by the government. They have been forgotten. Every four years or so, presidential campaigns swoop in and drum up support by saying that they’re going to bring back jobs and make everything right again. They want to believe that, because so many of them would give anything to have things be the way that they were. They don’t want to be rich and they don’t want welfare. They want to make an honest living doing what they love. So, when a spit-shined politico storms through the area and offers up promises to do just that, they want to believe, and often they do.

But you can only fool them for so long.

Once that stops working, they try a different tack, scare up the vote. Tell them that the reason the jobs aren’t coming back is that immigrants are taking them. Immigration is the problem, not the wealthy politicians helping out their wealthy friends, heavens no. Tell them that terrorists want to kill them and their way of life. That the freedom we all enjoy is hated by our enemies. The blame has to be placed somewhere after all the years of empty campaign promises, so why not peg it on the new folks that moved in down the road?

So, when Barack Obama simply states what is true about the people on the whole in rural areas, small towns and fly-over states, a bunch of well-fed pundits and stuffed shirts gasp in mock horror that someone in his position would dare speak the truth. It gets me a little rankled. How dare he actually state what is actually the case!

Senator Clinton rushing in and calling Obama an “elitist” gets me even more upset. This woman who, with her husband, has made over $100 million dollars since she became a Senator in 2000 is calling a guy whose yearly income has been closer to the amount that Bill Clinton recieved for giving a speech in Colombia is calling Obama an elitist? I don’t think so.

Hillary is using this as an excuse to fill up the ears of every person she meets with the same shit that policians have been slinging for decades. She’s playing the role that’s easiest for her, that of the Pander-bear, telling small town folk that they’re really optimistic and hard-working and blah-blah-blah. Gotta make sure that those blue-collar voters get their daily dose of meaningless platitudes. They are hard working and they want to be optimistic, but they’re not stupid, they’re desperate.

But, we can’t have the serfs actually realizing that they’re being screwed. It’s best to keep them docile and working two and three jobs, so they’re too tired to rise up and say what they really think. That’s the route that Hillary Clinton has decided to take with this issue, now that it’s been raised. But, people actually are bitter and scared and when they’re scared, they retreat back to what they know will comfort them- religion, hunting with friends, community -and they shy away from things that they don’t know, mainly foreigners and people that aren’t from around here.

That’s why I applaud Obama for the comments he made. It’s not pretty and we may not want to hear it or even admit it to ourselves, but it is the truth. He should have waited for a better setting than a fundraiser in San Fransisco. That was just stupid. But where he made the statement shouldn’t take president over the statement itself. The simple fact that he’s willing to awknowledge an ugly truth is heartening. It means that he might actually listen to it and try to do something about it, if he’s elected.

That’s already more than any policician has done in decades.

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