Posted by
Steve on Saturday, April 12, 2008 2:13:58 PM
Barack Obama is finally showing his colors. It may be too late for Mrs. Clinton, but not too late for John McCain. Barack Obama said that small town residents are bitter over lost jobs. That is why they own guns and cling to religion. That is not a way to endear you to small town America. There are a lot of people in America that live in small towns. They will not like being called bitter.
After he was called on it, Barack Obama did not apologize for his remarks. He amplified his comments and dug himself a bigger hole. Since this occurred on a weekend, there will not be much traction until Monday. But, when the radio shows play his comments over and over, Obama will wish he had kept his mouth shut. The talk shows will make him sound inarticulate. That is not what he is, but on this comment, he surely is inarticulate.
Most people that live in small towns live there because they want to. There are many advantages to living in a small town. I lived in a few during my career with the Soil Conservation Service. Everyone knew you and that was a great feeling. One other advantage is that everyone knew who your kids were and watched out for them. When they were doing something wrong, you would get a phone call that your child was at some place doing something wrong. That way you could show up and put a stop to the childhood transgression. The child was forever in the dark as to how you found out.
There are disadvantages to living in a small town. Recreation opportunities like movies are far away. Buying groceries and gasoline is usually limited to one place and the prices were usually not the best. School for the kids usually had only 8-10 kids per class, so many classes were combined. There was no Kindergarten program for 5 year old kids.
Living in a small town, I never had the impression that anyone was bitter over living there. Almost everyone in the small town wanted to be there and did not want to leave. If they had to leave, they always tried to make it back to their home town. The small towns I lived in ranged from 600 to 3500 people. The small towns that were far away from larger communities generally were the most stable. The ones that were within commuting distance of a large town had some of the big city problems cropping up. I did not see those problems in the small towns that were more isolated.
Barack Obama will not like the blowback that he receives from people that live in small towns. He will not like the blowback from people that remember the small towns they grew up in. That amounts to quite a lot of people. He just called them unimportant. No-one wants to be unimportant. Barack Obama may find that he is the one that ends up being unimportant out of all this.