What jacked up the eyebrow of blue-collar America was not Obama's crack about guns and religion as much as the second part of his quote, in which he said small-income townies turn to "anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." The tone of his assertion indicated he felt much the same as all upper-income American liberals: That such frustrations are absurd.

Actually, they're not absurd - not to people living from paycheck to paycheck, one banana peel away from financial disaster. These Americans have watched an undeclared open-borders policy fill this country with labor willing to toil long hours at microscopic wages, under conditions approaching the bedlam of 19th-century sweatshops. At the same time, they've seen this rollback of trade policy and workplace preferment defended as "progressive," and their own growing alienation dismissed as backward... and even racist. There is a common concurrence in American politics and media that anyone favoring measured, limited immigration be tarred as "anti-immigrant." In this context, there's apparently no allowance for any condition "illegal."

The Democratic Party's shift to the left decades ago veered it away from the mundane world of workaday folk. After all, the party was to be the boilerroom of change and progress, the engine that would take us to a more equitable, just tomorrow. The working class turned elsewhere, and many ended up in the camp of the GOP. It's not that this country has become more conservative over the last 40 years as much as there is no viable alternative to the right; the Democratic Party simply doesn't represent its traditional base anymore, and its platform favors whatever squeaky wheels catch its ear. American workers are worse off under pro-business Republican regimes - whose deep, abiding love of cheap labor further depresses domestic wages and marginalizes domestic wage earners - but this undercutting is accomplished without brutally insulting, phony charges of "racism."

The American working class, particularly the white working class, feel like both tax-resource cookie jars and social-experiment lab rats. It wasn't all that upsetting that Obama gave them a backhand - they're accustomed to such treatment. It's just that, for awhile, the parts of this embattled sector that supported him thought he was different - that he listened and that he was more than just another tapas bar revolutionary...