Obama wants us to focus on the real issues.

"People don't vote on economic issues because they don't expect anybody is going to help them," Obama told a crowd at a Terre Haute, Ind., high school Friday evening. "So people end up voting on issues like guns and are they going to have the right to bear arms. They vote on issues like gay marriage. They take refuge in their faith and their community, and their family, and the things they can count on. But they don't believe they can count on Washington."

From:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080412/ap_on_el_pr/obama_bitter_voters

The emails cited this Huffington Post article, which quotes Obama telling backers: "You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them," Obama said. "And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

From: http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/04/11/880232.aspx

Really!?! … That’s one of the strangest ways to look at the world I have ever heard. Obama talks about the cynicism that the people have for government. I guess there are people in government who are quite cynical about the way the American people vote. Can there be only one issue we vote on? Is it really that we just want a hand out and when we don’t get one we move to these other unimportant issues like constitutional law, social issues, border security, and global trade. We must be a bunch of retards. What a waste of time voting on these small issues when we should be just concerned about how much we can get out of the next President. Who’s really going to deliver all those hand-outs they’re all promising.

If we take the route of the permanent handout, the American character will itself be impoverished. Richard M. Nixon