Word: small-town
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...swing through Pennsylvania last month, John McCain visited a Manheim Central High School football practice - not to ingratiate himself with the players, who weren't even old enough to vote, but to identify himself with the gritty, down-home, lunch-bucket values of small-town football. "This is a blue-collar town," Manheim's coach said in his introduction of McCain. "We don't have a lot of flashy athletes. We don't come out with a lot of flash." But the coach explained that his team works hard, plays with discipline and comes through...
...Both candidates were asked to react to the speech by McCain's vice-presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, at the Republican National Convention, in which she seemed to belittle Obama's history of community service. ("A small-town mayor is sort of like community organizer, except you have actual responsibilities," she said to cheering delegates in St. Paul, Minn.) McCain said Palin was responding to criticism of her experience before becoming governor of Alaska and that "mayors have the toughest job, I think, in America." He also added, "Of course, I respect people who serve their community. And Senator Obama...
...Republican Party's subliminal message seems stronger than ever this year because of the nature of the Democratic nominee for President. Barack Obama could not exist in the small-town America that Reagan fantasized. He's the product of what used to be called miscegenation, a scenario that may still be more terrifying than a teen daughter's pregnancy in many American households. Furthermore, he has thrived in the culture and economy that displaced Main Street America - an economy where people no longer work in factories or make things with their hands, but where lawyers and traders prosper unduly...
...Except that's not really true. We haven't been a nation of small towns for nearly a century. It is the suburbanites and city dwellers who do the fighting and hourly-wage work now, and the corporations who grow our food. But Palin's embrace of small-town values is where her hold on the national imagination begins. She embodies the most basic American myth - Jefferson's yeoman farmer, the fantasia of rural righteousness - updated in a crucial way: now Mom works too. Palin's story stands with one foot squarely in the nostalgia for small-town America...
...Comparing Palin’s relatively paltry service in the small Wasilla and 20 months as Alaska’s governor to Obama’s tenure as state senator and then U.S. senator for Illinois can only hurt the Republican Party. Her speech weakly hid this fact, instead comparing her tenure as mayor to his pre-Harvard Law School service as community organizer. “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities,” she quipped...