Just Say No

While everyone's laughing it up over the fact that Barack Obama doesn't understand white people and hillbillies, they miss this simple truth: he doesn't understand Americans. His money quote, if you're not already sick of it:

"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. So it’s not surprising then that 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."

Sure, it's a bad case of foot-in-mouth syndrome, and like his other gaffes he shows no real indication that it's anything but what he actually believes. But let's translate it another way. "Cling to guns" could just mean "Believe in the 2nd Amendment." "Religion" sounds an awful lot like something I could've sworn was in the 1st Amendment. Obama may call it anti-immigrant sentiment, but everyone else calls it anti-illegal immigration sentiment, aka being against those who blatantly violate state and federal laws, aka criminals. And anti-trade sentiment? Was it those Pennsylvania hillbillies who put the brakes on the Columbia Free Trade Agreement?

What Obama really said was, even when times get tough, the economy gets lousy and jobs are scarce, everyday mainstream Americans are still dedicated to the ideas of maintaining the rights of the people and the limitations of the government. It's not that they feel betrayed that the G-men haven't rappelled in and saved them; it's that they don't think that's the job of government in the first place. And that idea is the Bogeyman to the educated elite, who consider it an affront to their self-acknowledged intelligence that little things like the Constitution should get in the way of what they know is clearly right for the country.

The best thing the Federal government can do for these small towns in trouble is to stop taking so much tax money, and get the hell out of the way so people can work. But that will never, ever emerge from Barack Obama's lips.