I think that Obama’s comment about small towns and economic insecurity and clinging to guns and religions overlaps with the question of the day about China. After all the economic insecurity that has people on edge—and which led to Obama’s remark, however ill-phrased—is caused by the manufacturing jobs in this country being lost to China. People can get upset with Obama for mentioning this. But in San Francisco, the pollution from Chinese manufacturing is blowing into town and raising asthma rates. For years I tried valiently to buy only clothes made in the USA, and have since realized that there are so few that this can be very tricky. I still don’t know any running shoes that are made in the USA anymore. And cars are made in so many countries that even the ones that are assembled here are not completely made here. Sometimes I wonder if the dollar falls far enough and the price of oil rises fast enough, will the jobs come back? What do people mean by elitist anyway? One cannot really imagine that anyone who is running for president is not an elitist in some sense. Each of the major candidates is a U.S. Senator. All went to top rated universities. I do not think Obama is any more an elitist than any other candidate, and in some ways he is much less an elitist, given his unconventional background. Some of the name calling is perhaps driven by the fact that the two Democratic candidates have very similar positions on most issues, so style is the only place to make distinctions. But it is still silly to imagine that Barack’s bowling score or Hillary’s beer chaser should matter. George Bush as president has been a national disaster. He has built a government run in secrecy, ruined the environment, run up the national debt, embarked on a war that is wrecking the military and is responsible for thousands and thousands of deaths and yet is gaining us more enemies every day. He has let the victims of Katrina suffer. He has repudiated science. He has defied the Constitutional checks and balances by adding “signing statements” to legislation. He has defied the Geneva convention and every sense of decency by approving torture. Then he parades the Pope around as if to eclipse the recent revelations about torture. [And yet I hear Bush himself never actually goes to church, for all his stories of piety.] Oh yes, and under Bush’s presidency, the bankruptcy act was amended to eliminate the tools people once had to fend off foreclosures. Is George Bush an elitist? He tries so hard to appear to be something else, spending so much vacation time cutting brush on his Crawford ranch. But if you watch his actions, he has spent his presidency enriching the superrich at the expense of the poor and middle class. So I say call Obama or Clinton anything you want, just let one of them win and start the process of restoring the Constitution, the economy and the foreign policy, of which we were once so very proud.

I think his comments about being bitter and and clinging to items to explain away frustrations will hurt him. It will hurt him because he stereotyped a large group ofpeople, and despite him saying now that he meant something and his supporters saying that he was being honest and trying to have an adult conversation, he did not have the conversation with the people he was stereotyping, he had it with a group of fund raisers behind closed doors never thinking his words would meet the open air.

In the 1990 Senate campaign in North Carolina, there was one ad and one moment that emerged as iconic. Run by Republican Jesse Helms against Harvey Gantt, a black Democrat, it showed a pair of white hands crumpling a piece of paper. “You needed that job,” said the voice-over ominously, “but they had to give it to a minority.” Those white hands now belong to Bill and Hillary Clinton, and their complaint is remarkably similar to that of the man in the ad. The Helms ad was a cri de coeur against affirmative action, or at least that form of it that gave preference in hiring—or presumably college admissions—to nonwhite applicants on the grounds (a) that this made up for generations of prejudice and curtailed opportunities, and (b) that diversity for its own sake was a good in itself. For decades, people who were so crass as to protest such quotas and take their complaint to court—from Allan Bakke at the University of California-Davis medical school in 1974 to Jennifer Gratz at the University of Michigan in 1995—were reviled by the left and by Democrats, portrayed as the second coming of Simon Legree and instructed to suffer in silence for the greater good of humanity. Now Bill and Hillary Clinton are finding themselves in those same shoes: She has applied for a job with experience and credentials that she thinks are weightier, and yet many voters seem determined to “give it to a minority” who has not paid his dues. According to the unwritten rules of themselves and their party, the Clintons ought to have shouldered their cross in the name of diversity. Instead, they are playing the race card with a vigor beyond Helms’s most extravagant dreams. In their hands and those of their surrogates (including the once well-regarded Bob Kerrey), a gracious and eloquent member of the upper house of the Congress running to be president of all of the people has become a cokehead, a dealer, a Muslim (with possible terrorist leanings), an ally of slumlords, and this year’s token black candidate. From the onetime president of black America, the defender-in-chief of quotas and set-asides, this is all unexpected, but then Bill and Hillary Clinton never expected that a walking example of all they professed to admire would come between them and something they thought they deserved. Hillary Clinton claimed at the start that her campaign would make history, and it certainly has. The first credible black candidate for president has been slimed, as long forecast, but this time by people within his own party, by the reigning First Couple of blue state America, who, along with their gaggle of hitmen, behaved just as liberals imagine evil Republicans do, but never people like them. Democrats have accused their own voters of having been racist. The Clinton brand has been tarnished, this time on issues beyond those of private behavior. Some analysts expect black voters to resume their old loyalty if Hillary wins the nomination, and perhaps they are prescient. But in swing states, even minor defections can make a big difference, and independent white voters may be less indulgent. They are famously resistant to race-tinctured sewage, and may be in no mood to forgive. Bill Clinton now has the “conversation on race” he once tried to instigate but not quite on the terms he proposed. Democrats are enraged, independents are stupefied, and conservatives swing between nausea and sweet vindication at the sight of their recent tormentors now ensnared in their own pious words.

There is no doubt that Clinton and Obama are both intelligent, well spoken and dynamic. Both are elite, both have been blessed with opportunity. When it comes to those struggling and hurting in the States and around the world I believe that Clinton is the one who really gets it. Hillary listens and genuinely appears to work for positive change. I was so hopeful when I first heard Obama speak at the democratic convention a few years ago. I thought here is promise for tomorow - what a bright light - and you know what - I still think that. But I also think that Clinton should take it this time - she has the best chance of stabilizing the country, and rebuilding a damaged international repuatation for the States once again. I think that when Obama appears to be condescending, which is more and more often, that it is really inexperience shining through.

Calling Obama elite is just another tired old tactic that seems to have worked for the last 40+ years but is getting really old and tiresome. Anybody who couldn’t see the point of the remarks Obama made about Pennsylvania needs to be re-educated in critical thinking. Of course when things are bad people are going to “cling” to the things that they find solace in within their lives, that’s only natural. The only people who didn’t see that remark for what it was were the people wanting to make gold out of straw. This is more than an election for the presidency, it’s an election for civility. Should Obama lose the primary, an entire generation is going to just say “f*ck it” to politics because the game is still being played. Stop the damn games because you’re doing more harm than good. And to the media, go back to reporting news instead of pushing drivel in order to sell advertising time.