Colleague points me to a piece by Michael Deibert, a journalist who grew up here in Lancaster and now lives in Kinshasha and written about Haiti and Africa for Salon.com, the Village Voice and other publications. But in this piece, he’s writing about the Obama-Hillary “bitter” business. And, he writes, the whole thing is driving him into Obama’s camp:

I have seen first-hand the struggles of working-class people in the region not as part of some study but rather in the experiences of my friends and family, growing up first in the city of Lancaster (about 55,000 people and three hours away from New York City) and later in the small town of Strasburg (about 3,000 people). Though I spent time visiting New York and Philadelphia while in high-school, my first real taste of the world outside was when I left for university in New York in 1992 and, especially, when I did a semester aboard studying at University College Galway in Galway, Ireland in 1994 and did a bit of traveling throughout Europe.

I have seen people like those in the cities and towns where I spent my youth watch as their ability to support their families on an honest day’s work was gradually eroded, as their ability to seek and afford quality medical care for their families disappeared and as, often, cynical and opportunistic politicians of the right exploited this sense of frustration and loss for political gain. Though Pennsylvania boasts two major urban centers in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and despite an increasingly large number of Latino residents, the majority of the state (where I grew up) might be best described as Budweiser-drinking, Merle Haggard-listening, gun-owning and very much white working class. …. I believe that, far more than Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama understands the struggles of the kind of people I grew up with and is thus in a position to effectively address them.

It’s worth, I think, going back and taking at look at Obama’s entire quote:

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.

The thing about this argument is that I’d heard it before. It is, in fact, the reiteration of an argument first made in 2004 by Thomas Frank in his book, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” In it, Frank wonders how a state once characterized by extreme economic populism could have abandoned that sentiment and replaced it with what you might call moral populism. The land that once wnated to burn the Eastern banks to the ground became the state that gave birth to the modern anti-abortion movement, even as the state declined economically, it’s towns stagnating, its kids leaving for brighter pastures almost anywhere else.

Frank concludes that the people of Kansas - and similar communities elsewhere - have been hoodwinked and maybe have permitted themselves to be hoodwinked. They concluded at some point that their economic disenfranchisement was intractible; instead, they sought inward change, transformed first themselves via faith, then s ought to remake their society in terms of the “values” which give them solace during hard times.

The thing is, I’ve had this exact discussion with local folks who identify as religious right. They believe their problems stem not from economic disenfranchisement but from the moral failings of the country. What understanding can they have of the ways of high finance? How can they move that mountain? No. They can affect change in individual hearts. And if they can affect a more moral America, a more obedient and faithful America, all that is wrong with America might be changed, and people can truly find happiness. Somehow.

For Obama, this came out as the working class “clinging” to their guns or seeking scapegoats among the “others” - specifically because they believe that’s all they can do. In a turbulend world, they “cling” to the things they believe really matter.

I think there’s much to this argument, though I don’t invest as much in it as Obama might. Pennsylvania’s gun culture, for instance, predates the culture wars by a long shot. And I think this country has a level of broad-based affluence whereby evenmany of the poorest enjoy creature comforts unknown in other countries - or even Kansas, circa 1899.

But we obviously live in changing times; times that often have the feel of deterioration. And now in particular, with gas prices being what they are, with the implosion of the mortgage market and inflation soaring, a broader range of people have begun to consider that the country’s economic troubles outweigh its moral shortcomings.

What you have is a pointed economic situation where more people are feeling the pain - and the “bitterness” - of those who live in the coal towns or the old steel towns and who saw the jobs go away 25 years ago. The progressive broad-based economic dislocation of these communities is becoming more acute. And that absolutely creates a feeling that you’ve been screwed. Hillary and the Republicans want to talk about how Obama was looking down on gun owners; they’re playing with dynamite. They want people to think Obama’s words were condescending. Seems to me there’s nothing more condescending than pretending that people who really do feel screwed see nothing but sunny days ahead.