This is not a political endorsement. It is, however, a cry of outrage that a candidate for president of the United States is attacked for speaking the truth.
Barack Obama has been quoted as saying, "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 it's not surprising then (that local residents) 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."
This is a brilliant description of what is true of places in Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Illinois. Obama did not sugar-coat the story. He told it as it is, as most local politicians would not dare.
Then along comes Hillary Clinton, who ignores the reality of these remarks and goes on to accuse Obama of attacking people of faith. Worse, the media labels Obama's words as a "bungle." Nonsense. He knows exactly what is happening throughout the North and in many of the towns of the industrialized Old South.
Manufacturing jobs that gave citizens good wages also provided identities to hundreds of towns. I was proud of a Ford Meter Box from Wabash (Ind.) in a sidewalk of San Juan (Puerto Rico). Folks from Bedford take pride in their limestone contributions to buildings and monuments nationwide. We know that Hoosier steel and its many transformations are vital to cars, trucks, homes and offices
Much of our struggle as a state is our mental distress. Just as it was finally sinking in that Indiana was not a farm state, we started to think that our pre-eminence in manufacturing was ending. There are Hoosiers, in and out of the General Assembly, who do not see that manufacturing is the heart of our past 100 years and the essential core of our next century.
http://www.nwitimes.com/articles/2008/04/20//business/business/doc229c4410e538ecf38625742d001cb8a1.txt