Bitter truth

It's no accident that the elite media is combining with the elite candidates to tar the one non-elite candidate with the brush of elitism. It's the Rovian method.

Obama's in trouble over something he said, and the trouble doesn't have even the slightest bit of logic. He spoke the truth to his California contributors:

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. 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.

Working class voters, in and out of Pennsylvania, who for some reason have gravitated to Hillary, are suffering. Read the income stats; they prove it. Yet, the Clinton campaign and the McCain campaign have jumped on any acknowledgement of this as elitist and condescending.

Huh? The millionaires in the race are telling us that it's condescending to express sympathy for the exact people that the consensus of late 20th century economic elites - including both of them - has beggared and left unrepresented.

A McCain spokesman, Tucker Bounds, makes this bullshit claim:

Barack Obama thinks he knows your hopes and fears better than you do. You can't be more out of touch than that.

No? How about not knowing their hopes and fears at all?

Hillary claimed that Pennsylvanians are persevering, as if Obama had said anything to the contrary. She calls his remarks "demeaning". Uh, how? Does she believe that it's wrong to identify people who need help? That it's condescending? That it's demeaning?

It's bullshit, intended to cripple the Democrats' effort, started by John Edwards, to recapture their natural class-based constituency. It's another thing that Hillary has done that's bad for whoever the Democratic nominee eventually is.