Sen. Barack Obama has received a good deal of flack for comments he made last week in San Francisco. Speaking of middle-class workers in Pennsylvania, he said, "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." Sen. Hillary Clinton immediately went for the throat, criticizing his comments as "elitist." (In today's CNN Compassion Forum, Clinton added "out of touch" to her characterization of his comments. Please keep in mind that Hillary is a graduate of both Brown University and Yale Law School, hardly bastions of the "common man.")

But are his comments wrong? Clinton has suggested that Obama is being "patronizing" in his suggestion that religion is something that people turn to when times are tough. But she has not answered Obama's argument: namely, that middle-class Americans in economically depressed parts of the country have lost faith in the ability of government to help them, choosing instead to turn somewhere else for help, or to blame others (in this case, immigrants) for the problems that government has caused.

Paul Levinson suggests that this is a non-issue, since working families know how hard their lives are, and for Hillary to suggest that everything is rosy is just as disingenuous as George W. Bush suggesting that the economy is doing just fine. What do Americans want: a politician who insists everything is fine as the country burns around her, or a politican who tells it like it is? John McCain didn't receive the same amount of criticism when he appeared in Detroit earlier in the year and told an audience there that "there are some jobs that won't be coming back." Mitt Romney, on the other hand, went to Detroit and said that they could get jobs back, and he could help.

That's a lie.

Aside from forcing American auto manufacturers from employing Americans in the United States, there's nothing the president can do. Furthermore, the "free trade" types that populate the Republican party would have none of it.

Every time Obama disseminates a harsh truth, Hillary calls him on it, as though the job of the president is to be the nation's cheerleader. What's the point in that? And, if Hillary really wants to make a change, why would she choose to adhere to a George W. Bush tactic; namely, putting an irrationally and incorrectly optimistic spin on a situation that isn't very good?