Leader of Nonprofit Group Urges Moving Beyond Obama’s ‘Bitter’ Comment

Sen. Barack Obama, under fire for telling a gathering in Marin County, Calif., that people in small towns are “bitter” about federal neglect of their communities, got in trouble because people hate to be on the receiving end of stereotypes, says Dee Davis, president of the Center for Rural Strategies.

“Who wants to be labeled?” he writes on the center’s online news journal, the Daily Yonder. “Even in the context of sharing polling data that correlates professed values with recurring disappointments, who wants to be summed up and explained away for the benefit of Marin County donors?”

But, he adds, the country’s challenge is to get beyond the controversy over the “bitter” comment and follow up on the Democratic presidential candidate’s point that “rural life is threatened by economic policy that perpetually fails rural communities.”

“There are 60 million of us in rural America,” Mr. Davis writes. “The poverty rates are substantially higher, as are rates of unemployment, substance abuse, diagnosed clinical depression, and deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Presidential candidates tend to deal with those problems by showing up every four years for the Iowa primary election to “take a stand on ethanol subsidies,” he adds. “As if it matters.”

The Center for Rural Strategies is a nonprofit group in Whitesburg, Ky., that seeks to promote better public understanding about rural issues. “Sadly, what is missing from the political debate are speeches about how robust rural economies lift national prospects, fill the coffers, expand opportunities,” Mr. Davis writes.

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