Political opponents will flog this horse well past death, seeking an advantage for whom? Themselves.

Which is a shame, if they succeed, because Obama’s effort was seeking to create a fresh understanding of the economic plight of a group of Americans that rarely get political redress because of the way the US political system has evolved. I don’t believe it’s only more urban areas where the voters sense the core of his message.

I was raised in a small town, lack a college degree, have lived a blue collar life and to me he seems to ‘get’ how the system has grown to be inefficient, unproductive and dysfunctional for rural and small town America. I think he sees what I see and have experienced pretty well.

He simply overgeneralized in his statement, because he didn’t mean everyone in small Midwestern towns fit one definition. He was trying to explain to a far removed urban audience why and how working class Dems got peeled away in recent decades. Others have previously characterized this group as ‘Reagan Democrats’, but in fact, they began getting peeled away in the 1968 campaign and went en masse in 1972 to Nixon, who was particularly adept at gauging public sentiment and appealing to bias and emotion at the expense of economic solutions.

And Obama wasn’t disparaging rural Americans at all. He was saying that group, ’some’ of those in communities where jobs and good wages, and any real benefits went away, where economic progress is measured in inches over decades and can easily be reversed by the occurence of one misfortune (illness, a layoff, car accident, divorce, a re-routed main highway even) makes their anguish understandable.

It’s not that Obama ‘doesn’t get it’; he’s saying some politicians have abandoned any effort to respond to their plight and have exploited their misfortunes for years. So they claim it’s not corporate greed that caused the hardship, it’s liberal elites. It’s not underfinancing of public schools and higher education at fault; it’s affirmative action. It’s environmental safeguards driving business away, not the pursuit of easier profit elsewhere that they can pollute and endanger at will. And you can’t trust Democrats to lead the way back to more prosperous times. Not only will they tax you to death, but they’re immoral and will try to convince you to abort your babies, recruit your kids to be gay, take away your hunting rifles that put food on your plate and bring illegal Mexicans in to compete for your job, and drive your wages down further.

Now there’s very few elected Republicans who fit that stereotype to the tee, either. Many have used one or two of those issues to trigger a single issue negative response simply so they can get elected. And eventually, as the decades roll by, the economic woes never go away, no matter how hard the small townfolk work, how many jobs they hold, how steadfast they are against candidates who support women’s reproductive rights, or how much welfare, college admission or school funding is ‘reformed’.

The corporations continue to follow the path that Halliburton did in the past few years: lobby the powerful politicians so they can get no-bid contracts handed to them, subcontract the work to foreigners at lower wages, then move their corporate headquarters out of the states to reduce the US taxes they pay on their record profits. Vice President Cheney, a major architect of Bush’s foreign policy, was Halliburton’s CEO and he’s made financial gains from these policies from the stocks he continues to hold. And small towns get devastated and stay devastated because of similar corporate decisions.

To stop the decline in the political fortunes of Democratic office-seekers, eventually, the DLC was formed, which adopted the strategy of compromise on certain issues. In effect, they emulated some Republican positions - especially on trade, a more aggressive foreign policy, gun ownership, punishment over rehabilitation for criminals, limits on public assistance to families while granting massive subsidies to big businesses where major campaign funds come from, while maintaining traditional Democratic support for human rights issues.

And still, even after a major technological revolution, better economic fortunes continue to pass tens of millions of people by. In rural environments, there’s far fewer options available for hardworking, motivated people than city environments provide. And politicians are more prone to pander to urban needs simply because of the far greater abundance of votes there.

When they claim to represent rural interests, that often means subsidies to corporate agribusinesses, not small family farms. And those corporations do, at least, provide some jobs for rural folks, even if the wages are low and there’s no health insurance. So Americans in small towns grasp tight those meager jobs and consider that big agribusiness bill to be as good a deal as they’re likely to get. And they’re right, if politics-as-usual prevails. They may lack healthcare or a retirement plan or any potential for savings, but at least, for awhile, they’ll have jobs.

Obama was trying to explain all that to an urban audience in a simplistic shorthand form. His effort was to create greater understanding, not to leave the impression that small town Americans were a bunch of dumb yahoos, but simply people who’d been victimized by corporate goals, charlatans - including certain profiteering televangelists - and then they got abandoned by politicians. And he’s saying that political policies that can improve and rebuild rural communities have to be part of the change agenda he’s espousing. After all, unless urban voters understand and agree to work for issues that better the fortunes of small town residents, the political push needed for that change will not be available. Obama’s recruiting city dwellers to unite for the common good instead of continuing the neglect that status quo politics have provided for decades.

The big question now is not whether Obama understands the dilemmas faced by small town Americans. It’s whether those Americans understand what Obama’s trying to change to provide fresh solutions in the place of old divisions.

I’m pragmatic enough to recognize that Obama’s not going to win over everyone, rural or urban. But in the small town face-to-face meetings he’s held, in Iowa and Pennsylvania and elsewhere, the people he’s encountered recognize that he’s not out of touch at all. Even those who’ve met him and decide not to vote for him have expressed that they don’t think he’s full of hot air and hyperbole. They find him genuine. And remain skeptical of his chances to win, because he’s Black, or young, or has less experience than his competitors have.

Those concerns display that rural voters are equally genuine and equally smart at weighing the hurdles Obama faces. They can look around their own communities and see some people who fit - at least partly - the shorthand description Obama provided.

Within my family, full of dairy farmers, blue collar workers and small town residents, I’ve had a few that could easily be caricatured. But the vast majority have proven pretty astute at sorting out the facts from the spin. Despite the lightning speed of the Republican attack squad and the simplistic distortion of his intended meaning that even Clinton has seized upon (guns and God), most of my small town relatives aren’t buying those narratives.

They do wonder whether a Black man can win, not because he’s out of touch or elitist or unpatriotic or prejudiced. But because they know there’s plenty of racists in this country who’ll reject him for no other reason. Yet even underneath that concern, I hear a foundational support that remains heartening. If he emerges as the nominee, almost all my relatives will vote for him because he’s a Democrat, and even most of my Republican relatives now view that as the greatest negative.

They, too, are ready for change from the disastrous foreign policy excesses and economic damage of the Bush administration. Compared to that, Obama’s misstep is viewed as unfortunate. But as one conservative Democrat noted to me yesterday, “even when Obama makes a verbal gaffe, it still sounds more lucid than the ‘Duh’ we’ve been hearing from the White House in the past seven years.”

Not even Rush Limbaugh and Karl Rove can spin away that.