Puffin’s Place

And the logic behind the firestorm of the following Washington Post blog report of Obama comments is?

Obama dismissed the idea that his struggles were based on his race, and instead offered lengthy observations about working-class disenfranchisement and its political manifestations.

“In a lot of these communities in big industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so long,” he told the donors. “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 going to 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.”

Source

What on earth is elitist about the above? Where does violence, provincialism, and the various pathologies come from other than from feelings of helplessness and despair?

What is going on with the media and other presumed listeners who distort every syllable to make news? I would expect the Clinton camp to play distortion games, but where has the left its collective brain? Obama has actually made a sensitive and intriguing observation about the failure of promise and the relinquishment of hope. But let’s ignore all that and focus on spin.

Every time the US gets a national figure capable of actual thought, we turn off our hearing aids and decide what it will amuse us to imagine we hear. We deserve better. Well, maybe we do not.