A piece of business first: I just deleted 5,500 comments that were being held in moderation. The vast majority were clearly offers of hardcore pics of various celebrities, but I didn’t read all of them, so if you left a comment that never appeared, I probably just deleted it. But that’s not the point of this post.
I’m excited that Pennsylvania’s primary is actually going to matter this year, but I haven’t yet made up my mind. In the early days of primary season, I was leaning strongly toward Hillary; now, though, I’m leaning more toward Barack. But that’s not the point of this post.
Obama’s getting a lot of flack for his comments about Pennsylvanians. To recap:
“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 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.”
Clinton, as everyone knows, responded by saying that Obama is “out of touch”.
I disagree. I know that Obama’s comments don’t paint the most flattering view of Pennsylvanians, and it’s not representative of all Pennsylvanians, but I think they do display a pretty good understanding of the mentality around here. I also think it’s important to note that he made these comments in San Francisco, where people are pretty unlikely to have any understanding of Pennsylvania attitudes and politics. In that context, those comments sound like a defense of the pessimism, bigotry, small-mindedness, and, yes, bitterness, so pervasive in our small towns and even big cities, rather than a condemnation.
Most of Pennsylvania is alienated from what’s happening in California and New York and even D.C., and the issues that are relevant in those places are not always the issues that are relevant here. And it’s awfully hard to untangle and understand the web of reasons that life here is so different than it is in the places time hasn’t forgotten, so it becomes awfully easy to blame the lack of good jobs on globalization and immigrants. And when people in Washington start talking about “taking away my guns” or ensuring that I have healthcare when all I really want is a job, well, one can see how it might be baffling.
There is a divide in America — there are many divides in America — and denying the differences in perspectives is not likely to help bridge those divides. Pennsylvanians are, as Clinton said, resilient, but we do, for the most part, have a very different worldview than New Yorkers or — especially — San Franciscans. Neither perspective is more “right” than the other(s), but if the people in power occupy one world and the people in rural Pennsylvania occupy another, recognizing those differences can look like elitism. It’s not, at least not necessarily. It’s realism.