Like most he-said/she-said political fiascos, I missed the original provocation on the Obama small town bitter quote and I'm still confused about what all the blather is about. Presumably it's the source of Richard Crowson's Wichita Eagle editorial cartoon today:

Admittedly, I'm generalizing a bit from Kansas, but the main reason small towns exist is because of agriculture. Small towns exist in the middle of an area of farms. (In Kansas they were literally, repeatedly laid out with one small town in the middle of each 6 x 6-mile block, with the county seats eventually rising to relative prominence.) For every so many people living on farms, there's a corresponding number of people in small towns doing business with them. So what's happened is that as the farm population shrank, small towns shrank with them. And those forces have been further exacerbated by small towns aren't big enough to support the schools, hospitals, cultural centers, and the more complex companies you find in larger cities.

One result of this is that small towns have effectively been forgotten about by most people in big cities, especially on the coasts, and that includes the private sector as well as government. For all of Clinton's economic growth in the 1990s, damn little of it occurred in small towns. (In KS the small towns that grew were the ones willing to tolerate the environmental distress of feedlots and a mass influx of Mexican laborers.) Are people in small towns bitter? I don't know, but one thing that is pretty clear is that they've been shunted off from most of the economic progress there has been recently. It also looks like they've tried to make up for this by embracing America's standard pieties. In particular, small towns provide a very disproportionate number of military recruits. There's no single explanation for that, but one large factor is the lack of other job opportunities.

I suppose one reason the "bitter" remark is seen as controversial is that embracing religion and/or patriotism is fundamentally a hopeful response to stress -- if anything, it's a form of denial, where one thing they're denying is bitterness. On the other hand, scapegoating others, be they illegal immigrants or Democratic elitists, does show one's bitterness, and there's more than a little of that, even if you don't want to admit it. The two reactions are intertwined enough that it's hard to sort them out. After all, today's hopeful enlistee is liable to turn into tomorrow's mangled, shocked vet.

The Democrats lost a lot of ground in small towns and poor rural areas -- West Virginia is the worst case -- during the 1990s when Clinton was wooing Silicon Valley and making hay for New York bankers. Robert Reich figured there'd be no problem sending low-paying jobs overseas because he'd raise scads of money to retrain everyone to become high-paid symbol manipulators. It will be hard to make that up because nobody has any real solutions to rural poverty, but it should at least be possible to show that what the Republicans have to offer is even worse. Small towns are hurting not just because they're small towns. They're hurting because almost everyone in America is hurting, because the Republicans have been siphoning wealth off to the already rich, squandering even more wealth, and sticking the rest of us with all the risks -- what they call "responsibility."