By Rod Rose
THE LEBANON REPORTER (LEBANON, Ind.)
LEBANON, Ind.
April 15, 2008 09:12 am
—
Barack Obama’s recent flirtation with political incorrectness has Hillary Clinton and TV talking heads salivating.
Too bad everyone’s missing the point.
Obama has been quoted, mostly out of context, as saying we here in small town America are bitter, cling to guns, and embrace religion.
Two out of three ain’t bad, as Meatloaf sang.
Come to think, the opening to that song is, “Baby we can talk all night but that ain’t getting us nowhere,” but I digress.
Mercifully brief reprise:
Obama was making a fund-raising pitch in Marin County, Calif., aka “Land Where Really Rich Residents of San Francisco Flee When They Finally Have Enough Money.” He thought it wasn’t being recorded.
Fool.
Of course, his comments were cell-camed, and of course that snippet hit the Internet. Hillary’s helpers gathered around the forge and exhaled rapidly and repeatedly, hammering out another “campaign issue” which conveniently ignores reality.
Sailing solemnly over the heads of both candidates and their camps are the wall clouds of the economic storm pounding rural America.
Some of the journalists who live in and write about small town America have seen a way to make this semantic tempest into an actual discussion of issues.
Al Cross, who runs The Rural Blog on the University of Kentucky’s Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, wrote Monday that Obama’s comment should lead to another presidential candidate forum on rural issues.
Obama, Cross wrote, “was talking about voting behavior, not general behavior, but that important distinction has not been made in much of today’s commentary.”
That’s because “much of today’s commentary” is coming from talking heads on cable TV news shows for whom silence is obscene. It doesn’t matter what they say so much as that they are saying something.
Cross include links to several Web sites where rural issues are really discussed.
The IRJCI, and the Indiana Farm Bureau, are among organizations that have encouraged the forum, Cross wrote.
Another group urging the forum is the Center for Rural Strategies. Dee Davis of the CRS wrote, “The real challenge is to follow up on Senator Obama’s earlier candid moment.”
Out here, away from the urbs, are more poor people, fewer jobs, higher rates of depression and abuse of drugs and alcohol — and deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, Davis wrote on his The Daily Yonder blog.
“In a time when the world is struggling to re-imagine how it will feed, fuel and heal a damaged planet, a full-throated oratory on where rural fits in may find surprisingly attentive audiences both back home and in parlors abroad,” Davis wrote.
Cross also had a link to comments by Barbara Leach of My Rural America.
Leach wrote on Saturday, “Thinking realistically, a lot of rural folks have lost their dream in these last 25-30 years ... suffering through the ‘farm crisis of the 1980’s’ and communities losing plant after plant of good union jobs moving overseas. And now, we’ve also got another mortgage lending crisis on our hands, too, so — no, everything isn’t coming up roses in rural America and from our view point, it’s a good thing when political leaders start recognizing it.”
The presidential primary votes of Hoosiers are, for the first time in nearly a half-century, meaningful. Obama’s remarks give us an opportunity to back two national politicians into corners and keep them there until they give us real answers to real problems — and we should.
We may not get another chance to talk all night.
— Rod Rose writes for The Lebanon (Ind.) Reporter. He may be reached at rod.rose@reporter.net.
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For other views
www.dailyyonder.com
http://myruralamerica.blogspot.com
www.RuralJournalism.com
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