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"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 they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not," he said.

"And 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," he also said.

The thinking here is clear. Crystal clear. Obama has clarified that his views are an "underlying truth." They are also stunningly condescending, something JFK warned against. Particularly are they so towards blue collar and small town Pennsylvanians.

IN THE OBAMA WORLD (and note he said this in San Francisco, not in Altoona), the thought honestly just doesn't occur that someone in Pennsylvania towns like Juniata or Chambersburg or Bedford or Forest City or Warren could own a gun for the sheer joy of hunting on a crisp late fall day in the woods of Pennsylvania. Or even because one believes passionately in a Second Amendment right to do so. Or, gasp, because in the pursuit of happiness one just loves to shoot a gun! No, all those hunters you see in the huge swaths of Penn's woods are tramping around in their fashionable camouflage and bright orange come deer season because, in Obama's leftist world, they must have some sort of "frustration" that can only be soothed by clinging to guns. In heaven, the sound is heard of Charlton Heston laughing.

Having already displayed a mind-boggling elitist view of Pennsylvania gun owners, Obama wanders on to reveal an elitist's thoughts on our religion. He quite seriously believes Pennsylvanians "cling" to religion out of the same kind of bitterness that has them clutching guns in their warm, very much alive hands. One wonders whether the Senator has ever bothered to ponder that those of us who attend churches in small Pennsylvania towns do so not because of the Marxian inanity that religion is the opiate of the masses but because we are the lineal descendants of William Penn and his Quakers. Penn's followers came to Pennsylvania intent on the words of English Quaker George Fox: "My friends...going over to plant, and make outward plantations in America, keep your own plantations in your hearts, with the spirit and power of God, that your own vines and lilies be not hurt." As historian Daniel Boorstin noted in The Americans: The Colonial Experience, the very insistence "on a belief in equality" that was instilled by the first Pennsylvanians came out of -- and is maintained today -- precisely because so many Pennsylvanians of all faiths saw their churches as a place to nourish and care for the "inward plantation" that is a human soul believing both in an Almighty God and the liberty of all men and women.

These views are alien doctrine to Obama and his wife Michelle, both well-educated and well-paid liberal elitists, for a reason that has been abundantly clear to Americans since about 1968. The moral core of modern liberalism has been hollowed out, the heart once vibrantly represented by FDR and JFK replaced by a bleak and soulless view of the world that not only gives a pass to the racism of a Jeremiah Wright or the bomb setting of a William Ayres it never blinks at the telling of falsehoods designed to gain the heights of power. Political power is the only god left for liberalism to worship. It may be sought with bombs by Ayers, racism by Wright or by Obama's simply never blinking as he tells an increasingly longer list of outright falsehoods.

But in the end, the question that keeps coming back into view is always the same. Every time an Obama commercial sails on to a Pennsylvania television screen, that question -- and the patterns that raise it -- becomes more insistent. It is a question of character.

Based on what we are seeing here in Pennsylvania, all by itself that one question should disturb.

A lot.

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Trade, John McCain, Barack Obama, Television, Business, Religion, Abortion, Law, Iraq, NATO, Oil