I see Obama’s point from a sociological perspective, but most of the voters will not and just hear that he is associating small town people in a bad spot with fundamentalism and guns. Obama was first quoted and first reported here:

“You go into 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.

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.”

However, I think this is a better characterization of where I live:

In the midst of this harsh pastoral, Pennsylvanians are scrappy survivors. They complain (particularly about their governor and Clinton surrogate Ed Rendell, who doesn’t seem as popular as the media make him out to be), but they endure. They refuse to be bound to the broken temples of commerce and manufacturing, the vacant Beaux Arts hotels, the rotting nineteenth-century row houses, the abandoned sidings and once-grand railway stations that inscribe Scranton and Wilkes-Barre and diminish Pittsburgh and Lancaster. Pennsylvanians are remarkably chipper. In the end, the material world that once gave them prosperity has not defined them. On the contrary, Pennsylvania unfolds in an interlocking chain of Turkeyfoots and Allentowns, held separately and together by a sense of shared community, of humor, of history, and of abiding faith.

What’s clear is that Obama is not going to make any friends at all in Pennsylvania with his remarks.

As I commented on Jim West’s blog, with whose analysis I agree, what Obama was trying to say is that when people are facing depressions and disorder in their lives, they will cling to political ideologies that provide order. These usually come in the form of personal property rights and very specific and absolute ethical norms.

But as a resident in one of the small town areas in central PA that he is referring to, cheap beer and and pot become the sources to more or less just numb the sense of disorder. The result is a combination of politics that is apathetic and an ethics that is “easy” - that does not raise more questions.

One of the panelists on Meet the Press this morning hit the nail on the head though. He said that Obama can’t be running for sociologist in chief and that is the error he makes with such statements. In William James’ words, the man in the street does not care about political and sociological analysis at all. They want to ensure that their property is protected and that the government will not rob them.

Pennsylvanians are pragmatists and are not stupid. What we respect are people who work hard and try to do their best for the sake of their family, their country, and yes their God. We tend to respect difference of opinion and differences in culture, but using your circumstances as a crutch for government to enable bad behavior is not acceptable. Even though it is a blue state, largely from the voting mass in Philadephia, once you remove Harrisburg and Philly, you are in a red state. Even Democrats tend to be more conservative that you think (this one included). We are more about the Pittsburgh Steelers than the Philadelphia Eagles. We are about beer, wings, and campfires. We like to hunt and tolerate long snowy winters that are often hard. Guns are not the problem, people are.

As the economy suffers and more of our residents go over seas to Iraq, we face a rising drug problem as larger cartels in New York and Philadelphia use the robust infrastructure in Pennsylvania (we have more roads per square mile than anyone) to set up shop in our towns. The drugs spill over into our economically depressed communities and we are working hard to stop the bleed. We, on balance, do not like Ed Rendell. We did, on balance, like Tom Ridge.

People in Pennsylvania will not hear the sociological point that Obama was making. They will hear a derogatory point and mischaracterization about the Keystone state. This does not favor Clinton, it will surely favor McCain who Pennsylvanians will see as a hard-working veteran who understands the small town worker more than Obama. It does not even matter if that is true. It matters that this is what it looks like.