Rav Casley Gera

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.

Now look. Come on. This is not an insult. This is not a Kerry-style gaffe. And it’s not going to hurt Obama against anyone except, feasibly, small-business owners, who lean Republican anyway. This is the truth. And its harshness is softened by its genuine sympathy for working-class people.

Kerry’s remarks about getting “stuck in Iraq” were harmful because they backed up what people already suspected: that Kerry, while genuinely sympathising with poor people, didn’t know them, didn’t understand them, and deep down, didn’t like ‘em. Barack Obama is not John Kerry. Barack Obama is not an elitist. He grew up in Chicago, not Beacon Hill, Boston.

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