Nash McCabe – “I’m 52 and unemployed, but I’d rather talk about lapel pins”
had a great post about why some woman from Latrobe got to ask Obama a question. According to them, her first appearance on the national stage came from a NY Times article where we learned that, even though she’s 52, unemployed, and living in a small town, she only seems to care about whether her president wears a lapel pin.
She’s exactly the person Obama is talking about when he says that people in small towns are bitter and cling to things like religion or guns or lapel pins. It’s not that their bitterness makes them love these things. It’s that they’re so disenchanted with government that they don’t think it can fix the big things, like the economy, so they focus on the little things.
In other words, she is an example of the attitude Obama was talking about. Maybe ABC was trying to be ironic when they let her on to ask her question. Or maybe they were just their usual clueless selves.