Bittergate

You’ve probably already read or heard the remarks but here goes:

"It’s not surprising that 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."

There you have it: some truth, some correct implicit moralizing, elitist scorn and condescension, some false implicit time series (guns and religion do not closely track economic decline), and some totally unpopular cosmopolitan sympathies.  The "they" is the clincher, a hypostatizing and vaguely offensive generalization, yet one which we are all prepared to make in different contexts.

By the way, here is John Lott meets Barack Obama, worth reading for the scene of the encounter.

I think increasingly that Obama is very much a rationalist, in both the good and the bad senses of that term. 

If I think about what makes me bitter, it is highway and roadway construction and bad airports and the attendant delays.  You can decide for yourself what that makes me cling to.