Obama’s remarks on small town America spot on
Obama is under fire for telling the truth about small town America — they’ve been left behind:
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.
Not surprisingly, Clinton and McCain jumped all over these remarks. And so did the media. And so did the pundits. They’re all wrong.
The jobs that used to support these towns: logging, textiles, and manufacturing…are gone. They are not coming back. Ever. America is on the move from an industrial to a service economy. Politicians know this, yet they shy away from breaking the news to the people who hold out for these jobs to return.
Yet people still live in these towns. They hold out for jobs and an era that will not return. We’ve collectively moved on culturally and economically. Bad news hurts, but you can usually trust someone who is willing to break it.
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