Pennsylvania

Barack Obama's remarks concerning the supposed bitterness of working-class Pennsylvanians have caused considerable controversy.

Was Barack Obama wrong to suggest that a sense of bitterness and disappointment has driven working-class voters to "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them"? Note that Obama was making a number of discrete, subtle points. First, he was offering an implicit critique of the Clinton Administration, which made promises that were left unfulfilled. Second, he was trying to offer a rationale for holding views that his audience of affluent liberals might find distasteful. And third, he was making the eminently defensible and almost banal observation that people who are disappointed by high politics will often turn to primary loyalties -- the traditional, familiar truths of faith and family that endure when all else changes.