<p>Point no. 1: “people have been beaten down so long, and they feel so betrayed by government, and when they hear a pitch that is premised on not being cynical about government, then a part of them just doesn’t buy it.”</p>
<p>Point no. 2: “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.”</p>
<p>Point no. 3: “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.”</p>
<p>This is the inartfully expressed part. I believe Obama is saying that, in light of points one and two, it makes sense that people are bitter over the loss of jobs that have been gone for 25 years, and that they are cynical whenever “government” or “politicians” promise a return to economic prosperity for them and their children. The “Clinging to religion” part refers to faith-based explanations for why things have gone to hell in a hand basket, moral issues like abortion and homosexuality, which are still very important in rural and lower middle class religious life. Issues of distraction, like gun rights, are things that can restore some semblance of a feeling of power to people who feel they’ve been rendered powerless, when it comes to providing a better life for their families. The issues of illegal immigration and anti-trade provide explanations for why there are fewer jobs for working class Americans, and act as a release valve for yes, bitter frustration. I believe Obama was trying to express all these thoughts in that one very compressed and inadequately expressed sentence. But all of this was said by way of expressing the importance of </p>
<p>point no 4: “our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives.”</p>
<p>If you’ll read the entire quote with some attempt at objectivity, forgetting that you hate the man’s guts, you might glimpse that he actually feels sympathy for the plight and frustrations of the men and women in these small towns, that he understands where they are coming from. He expresses this well in the beginning, but then things loose cohesiveness when expressing the more complex idea of people’s logic when attempting to cope with these problems. </p>
<p>I think it’s extremely unfortunate that contemporary politics has come down to this microscopic parsing of every word that comes out of a candidate’s mouth, this constant surveillance for opportunities to twist words and convey meanings out of context, because once it starts, there’s no controlling how far, or how absurd it becomes. Hillary and Bill are being extremely hypocritical in their attempt at Obama assassination, by hammering on this quote. But hey, as long as no one calls you on it, as long as it achieves its end, the means are justified, right? But they’d better watch out. If Hillary does manage to win the nomination, the Republicans will do what they do best, which is dig and rip and discredit every word that ever came out of either Clinton’s mouth. And in the context of their collective public life, that’s a LOT of words. They’ll be getting as good as they’ve given Obama and then some, and they won’t be able to control it by any means, because once you lower the bar for political mudslinging, it’s open season on you too.</p>