[BigRedBeta]

Read the book What's the Matter with Kansas?. What Obama said is certainly true (I find the religion dropped in there to be very odd in its phrasing, though), and those are things that the Conservative Right have preyed upon for political gain.

A lot of what's being said in this thread is exactly what I was expecting - the rhetoric that liberals can't be for family values, can't be patriots, can't have religious convictions.

My undergraduate degree is in Sociology, and I'll be the first to admit that I'm guilty of immediately looking at how outside forces shape people's thinking, rather than focusing on "personal accountability" or making decisions in a vacuum like many psychologists make things out to be. I constantly look at the context in which a person makes a decision, how society has limited their options, or pushed other ideas to the forefront or so on. There's a subtlety in what Obama said, that when I read it, I found it to mean that it's NOT that people are "clinging" to these items/ideas and they're wrong to do so, but that they're "clinging" to them in their politics and politicians have used these ideas to win votes, when the economic policies that these politicians espouse are detrimental to these very same rural voters. It's that subtlety that is undoubtedly being lost by the talking heads, and has lead to Obama going into damage control mode.

In What's the Matter with Kansas?, the author does a pretty impressive job of showing how for the most part, Conservative politicians who run on abortion, gun control, religion in schools, and similar platforms have time and time again failed to make any significant headway on these issues, and yet still win voters by using them over and over. Kansas in particular has essentially become a 3 party state in which there is a ton of infighting between Conservative Republicans (typically poor rural voters worried about cultural items), Moderate Republicans (upper middle class voters from the Kansas City suburbs worried most about economic issues) and Democrats (urban voters in KC and Wichita taking normal Democratic positions). What Obama said, pretty much sums up what has happened in Kansas. Rural voters go against their economic interests because of social issues, vote Republican, which typically results in economic decisions that further harm these rural voters. The mods, they're generally happy enough to take in the social issues for the larger economic goals. It's most notable in Kansas though, that the conservatives have made the Mods uncomfortable about these social issues, because of what that has resulted in (Kansas striking evolution from state science standards and the like).

What this will ultimately end up meaning for Obama, I don't know. I appreciate how he avoids being a 'sound bite' politician, but sometimes it's hard to get your point across when you explain the shades of gray.