Despite his unfortunate, elitist, professorial, egg-headed (or whatever you want to call them) words at a San Fransisco fundraiser, Obama is the best choice for PA voters from small rustbelt towns. Obama’s life narrative may be unique, but he is the candidate with the strongest family values – from the closeness of his own family to his call that absentee fathers take personal responsibility for the children they bring into the world. He clearly has strong religious convictions. He doesn’t drink. He rose to where he is totally on his own merits, with help from student loans. In purely financial terms, he and his wife are worth considerably less than the Clintons or any President in recent memory.

Most of all, like Ronald Reagan, he is thoroughly optimistic about the future. His whole campaign has been built by uniting people on what we all have in common instead of dividing people on ‘red’ and ‘blue’ and wedge issues. This drive to unite people to win at least an equal playing field has deep roots in both the labor and civil rights movements – each of which is testimony to America’s unique gift of being able to reform itself.

And he’s got guts. He often talks about being an ‘imperfect’ agent of change given his mixed race background, foreign sounding name, and some exotic locales in which he lived. But he has given equal attention to all segments of the population during this campaign. He has campaigned and won in Republican bastions in Iowa, in rough and tumble mountains states like Idaho and Wyoming, s well as in big cities.

He has been willing to put himself out there as himself (suit and tie included) and to campaign as himself and not some manufactured robot. He has depended on and benefited from the open-mindedness and hospitality of all the people he’s campaigned among. Part of who he is, however, is a highly –educated, former law professor.

Conservatives and Republicans are besides themselves with glee, charging him with elitism for slipping into a disjointed, professorial response to a question. But part of Obama is the highly intelligent, former law professor, too.

But Obama embodies so many small town, American traits (presumably passed down by his small-town, American mother and grandmother), that the charge seems strangely out of tune. Obama himself clings to his family and religion and most families circle t he wagons when their threatened with harm.

Nevertheless, ‘bittergate’ signals the opening shot of the ‘culture wars’ for the general election. Incredibly they were started from within the Democratic Party itself, against the candidate whose campaign exists to defeat destructive partisan fighting, and by the candidate despised by even moderately conservative voters for her own self-destructive mendacity and for enabling the putrid side-show that engulfed the presidency in the late 90s.

At least Obama has taken his marriage vow seriously.

You certainly can't say the same for John McCain. He dumped his wife to marry up.

Come to think of it...

That's probably considered a value by Republicans.