![]() And for the record, median hourly wages in Pennsylvania are down 16 cents from five years ago, adjusting for inflation. At a fundraising dinnerĭuring his first term with the “haves and the have-mores,” as he referred to them, Bush said: “Some people call you the elite - I call you my base.” Now, he was joking, but there’sĪn element of truth there. And he is the only leader who has actually embraced the elite label. Bush, when he was drinking, was probably a fun guy in a bar - all those fratīoy tricks, flatulence jokes and arcane stats on long-retired major leaguers.īut he’s run the country into the ground, even if the only measurement is how blue collar workers fared under his watch. The only question should be how - or whether - Rust Belt and rural townsįor that matter, we should retire the test over which presidential candidate voters would most like to have a beer with. Of a foreman who says, “these jobs are going boys and they ain’t coming back.”īut for a presidential campaign, we should forget rock lyrics, guns and God, and who can throw back a boilermaker like a real man. Nobody in American literature or politics has done a better job than the Boss of describing (as in “My Hometown”) the heartbreak Obama can counter with the endorsement this week from Bruce Springsteen. She’s got elite cred with the best of them. Yes, and after that it was Wellesley, Yale, the White House and the $109 million fortune she made with her husband trading in their name and influence. The low point in this discussion was Hillary Clinton talking about how she learned to shoot - “behind the cottage that my grandfather built on a little lake called Lake Winola outside of Scranton.” The other side says religion is for fools,Īnd if only they had a new Starbucks in town, some of those Bible-banging gun nuts could learn to love Sundays with Norah Jones and a Scrabble game. One side rushes to drape themselves in flags, guns and the kind of Norman Rockwell hagiography that is far removed from the 2008 reality of meth labs and foreclosure frontiers. In that sense, the arc of this controversy is typical of how these things go: struggling towns are props, not issues. The pundits and voters are having two different conversations, not for the first time. This sentiment, real but wrapped up in pride over place, may be in part why the polls show little change in Barack Obama’s standing since his comments about the bitterness of small towns and the working class. Optimism, as much a part of the landscape as winter wheat, was disappearing. ![]() Only 11 percent of them said they were satisfied A few years ago, a University of Nebraska survey of 3,087 people in rural counties asked people how they felt about their lives. ![]() The honest ones say they would follow their kids People who live in small towns that have been passed over don’t need to be told that they’re bitter, or heroic. ![]() Pa., or Utica, N.Y., or any of the 900 counties across the country that have lost jobs or population for decades. My town was Spokane, Wash., which has rebounded somewhat from the collapse of Kaiser Aluminum. It’s an old story, the grinding of winners into losers, a sort of geographic lottery. And then there were those who turned to alcohol. Some of them turned to God or guns for comfort - or at least for diversion. You could say, without starting a fight, that In less than a generation’s time, the life jobs at the aluminum factory disappeared and the men lost their health benefits, their pensions, their self-confidence. They drank beer at a morning happy-hour after the graveyard shiftĮnded, and voted for Democrats because they cared about the little guy, or so it was said. In the town where I grew up, men had new trucks in their driveways, and three weeks of vacation for chasing deer in the fall and fish in the summer. ![]()
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