Recently I've had occasion to spend a few weekends in Pennsylvania.  As with any place you visit there are going to be hiccups.  I spent the night in one motel that had a serious personality problem but beyond that I found the folks in western PA to be hospitable, hard working and swimming upstream with vigor in a tough economic river.  I realize Senator Obama and I travel in different circles but after reading his recent remarks about Pennsylvanians I had to wonder if he and I were even in the same state.

For the most part I've found Senator Obama free of the annoying condescension exhibited by many of the residents of Obamaville; plus, after his politically astute speech on race, I thought BO had perfected the art of being all things to all people.  Now comes word that at a San Francisco fundraiser Senator Obama had this to say about the people of Pennsylvania:

"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."

Now before I go any further let me say that the Senator has not let me down, in Indiana he made one fine CYA save after a mini controversy broke out over his words:

"And for 25, 30 years Democrats and Republicans have come before them and said we're going to make your community better. We're going to make it right and nothing ever happens. And of course they're bitter. Of course they're frustrated. You would be too. In fact many of you are. Because the same thing has happened here in Indiana. The same thing happened across the border in Decatur. The same thing has happened all across the country. Nobody is looking out for you. Nobody is thinking about you. And so people end up- they don't vote on economic issues because they don't expect anybody's going to help them."

That's the transformational Obama, the Obama who is going to mend the broken promises of the last thirty years, who will spread his arms around us and bind us together as one nation - the problem is though whatever he may want us to think he said, whatever meaning he now wraps around his words, the disdain of Senator Obama for the working class people of Pennsylvania is baldly evident and it is made even more evident by the location in which the Senator delivered his lesson on the Pennsylvania psyche: a fundraiser in San Francisco.  Now I love SF and agree with quite a few of the political opinions that waft their way down from those progressive heights but if you're preaching to the Obama choir in San Francisco, you're not making a case for displaced blue collar workers in PA.

"they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them" - If indeed this withering assessment of the people of Pennsylvania were true then it would appear to me that they aren't that much different from the people who sit in Senator Obama's church, mired in the past, nursing enmity toward those they feel have wronged them.  Until confronted with an uncomfortable political situation Senator Obama felt no need to address those feelings in the congregation of his own church but he has no problem at all calling out the people of Pennsylvania.  Senator Obama's words recall to me the haughty words of his wife Michelle - a woman who had the privilege of attending a magnet school, Princeton and Harvard - and yet has not been proud of her country until it had the good sense to perhaps nominate her husband to be President of the United States, who has no memory of the first time she voted.

Speaking on CNN Jeffrey Toobin derided those who characterize Senator Obama's comments as elitist:

"I just think it's remarkable that Barack Obama, this guy who grew up in a single-family household with no money, who lived in Indonesia, who came from very modest upbringings, somehow he's the elitist? That's really a pretty extraordinary sort of contortion of his background. "

I respect Mr. Toobin, just as I respect the scholastic accomplishments of Senator and Mrs. Obama but, let me tell you, I know a lot of people who rose by their own efforts out of trailer parks who would now not be seen in those trailer parks.  There is nothing about having a modest beginning that prevents a person from becoming an elitist.  And if we're going to play "Dueling Backgrounds", don't forget the Bill Clinton refrain. William Jefferson Clinton was born three months after his father died and spent his early years living with his grandparents.  Later on when his mother remarried, Mr. Clinton's stepfather was an alcoholic who abused Bill's mother.  It has become the stuff of jokes but I do believe he feels my pain.

And, of course, the CNN exchange couldn't end without someone bringing up how much the Clintons earned in the last eight years.  It was left to the eternally grumpy but strangely likeable Jack Cafferty to chime in:

"He didn't make $109 million in the last eight years did he?"

No, sir, Mr. Cafferty, he didn't but get back to me eight years after an Obama presidency, should it come to pass. 

So, I guess I've been visiting the state of Pennsylvania while Senator Obama has been visiting the transcendent state of Obama-ville - I'm not sure those two states are even in the same country.