Hillary Clinton must now think that Barack Obama has offered her the wedge she's been looking for with his guns-religion-antipathy remark. His comments about small-town "bitterness," she said, were "not reflective of the values and beliefs of Americans."

So it's come to this: the laggard tasks the frontrunner with being, in essence, un-American. As Theda Skocpol more or less puts it in a letter to Josh, for shame.

At his fundraiser (in San Francisco, yet), Obama spoke artlessly, forgetting that the first law of American politics is: Flatter the rubes. He said small-town people get bitter, not "some people are angry." He said "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them," not "vote on wedge issues," and did indeed fall into the Tom Frank vulgar Marxist trap of seeming to say that love of guns or religion (or antipathy, even) is merely derivative, not fundamental.

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