In Touch and Out of Touch

Barack Obama has been catching hell for this comment he made last week about small-town America. Clinton and McCain have argued that this shows how Obama is 'elitist' and 'out of touch' with average Americans.

"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."

I fail to see how this statement is inaccurate. It seems to me a reasoned insight on why some Americans think and vote the way they do. If anything, it demonstrates how well Obama understands the psychology of Americans.

But people in this country don't want to be told the truth about why they're religious, militant, or xenophobic. They merely want to cling to the comfort that their willful ignorance provides. And so honesty and candor are perceived as 'elitist' and 'out of touch', and are replaced in the political discourse by ingratiating equivocation - which gets people elected but doesn't accomplish much else.