Things Are Getting Bitter and Bitter for Obama

The MOMs (master's of media) are having a field day with Barack Obama's statement about the "bitter" small town workers. The press freely echoes the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and John McCain who try to make political hay out of his statement which I quote below:

"You go into 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," Obama reportedly continued. "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."

“People don’t feel like they're being listened to," Obama said. "And so they pray and they count on each other and they count on their families. You know this in your own lives. And what we need is a government that is actually paying attention, a government that is actually fighting for working people day in and day out, making sure that we are trying to allow them to live out the American dream.”

We can argue about whether the words are politically correct or the degree to which they are true for every person living in a small town, but it is not possible to argue that there is a lot of truth to them. But are his words "elitist", as the Clinton and McCain campaign claims or simply observational? I would argue that in the context they were stated, they are observations. By definition, elitist means "The belief that certain persons or members of certain classes or groups deserve favored treatment by virtue of their perceived superiority, as in intellect, social status, or financial resources."--clearly he was not claiming superiority, so much as trying to explain differences.

As he later explained, he was describing the disappointment that people who have been let down by again and again by the government. Obama said, “the underlying truth of what I said remains, which is simply that people who have seen their way of life upended because of economic distress are frustrated and rightfully so.”

At the crux of all of this is the inability for some to admit that what John Edwards termed the "Two Americas" exists and Obama was reflecting this view. It is detestable to think that opponents would choose to apply a scorched earth policy to kneecap the only candidate that uses honest reflection to drive home his points. It is more detestable that the press is slipshod in reporting what is actually going on in the lives of people living in small town America.

It may be a bitter pill for some of us to swallow, but Obama is mostly right. The only thing he neglected to say is that media has a lot to say about what we absorb as true--Big Media, give us some truth.