Small-town, working-class people are more likely than their cosmopolitan counterparts, not less, to say they trust the government to do what’s right. In the 2004 National Election Study conducted by the University of Michigan, 54 percent of these people said that the government in Washington can be trusted to do what is right most of the time or just about always. Only 38 percent of cosmopolitan people expressed a similar level of trust in the federal government.

Do small-town, working-class voters cast ballots on the basis of social issues? Yes, but less than other voters do. Among these voters, those who are anti-abortion were only 6 percentage points more likely than those who favor abortion rights to vote for President Bush in 2004. The corresponding difference for the rest of the electorate was 27 points, and for cosmopolitan voters it was a remarkable 58 points. Similarly, the votes cast by the cosmopolitan crowd in 2004 were much more likely to reflect voters’ positions on gun control and gay marriage.

Small-town, working-class voters were also less likely to connect religion and politics. Support for President Bush was only 5 percentage points higher among the 39 percent of small-town voters who said they attended religious services every week or almost every week than among those who seldom or never attended religious services. The corresponding difference among cosmopolitan voters (34 percent of whom said they attended religious services regularly) was 29 percentage points.

This accords very well with our experience in the Polka Nation. We're even in Jim Sensenbrenner's district, one of the most reliably Republican areas of Wisconsin. Yet by and large, the people here aren't that much more conservative than they are in other parts of the state.* How can this be?

A while back, when I was in college, I heard about a study of the noise pollution generated by freeways. The authors discovered that the people who lived closest to the road weren't actually the most likely to complain. That would be folks who lived farther away, between half a mile and a mile. The difference, according to them, was that the people closest in had the most tenuous economic lives. They had other problems to worry about, in other words. Their neighbors up the hill could make the mortgage and the car payments, and so had the breathing room to fret about the eight lanes just down the street.

It's the same thing with social issues. The white working class - rural or urban - is aware that it's getting screwed in the information age. If you asked my congregation what single issue they were most concerned with, I have no doubt they'd tell you about the rising cost of health care.

Their number two concern would probably be providing quality jobs for their children. I just spoke to an elder in the congregation the other night who was ecstatic that his son was going to come out of college earning more than his pop, who'd been on the assembly line for thirty years. You could just see the relief in his face that his boy had a good job. Many of the other parents at Salem have resigned themselves to watching their kids move away so they could work a decent job, or at least one in their chosen field.

You might think that's a variation on the idea that the working class votes on economics, not social ideology. That's true to an extent.

But it also points to the somewhat limited horizons of the working class. The folks I know aren't very threatened by same-sex marriage or abortion. There aren't any abortion clinics near us, and (according to them) no gay folks, either.

Even setting those issues aside, working class people tend to be somewhat parochial. I don't mean that as a criticism: it's just that they're focused on what happens at the shop, or at church, or in the neighborhood. The town board is pushing a plan to build a park. They also have a reputation for being a good-old-boys club. Both issues are keeping our neighbors up at night: the friendly biker across the road is mulling a run for the board, which we're encouraging for no better reason than that we like him. He also hates the bar down the street as much as we do. That's a good thing. But the point is that the focus around here is definitely on around here.

Which is not to argue in any way shape or form that the people in rural Wayne are just a bunch of ignorant hicks. Folks know about and appreciate social concerns or macro-issues like global warming. But if they can't see an immediate local effect, well, it seems fairly remote. In the meantime, they've got other things to worry about. Believe it or not, that's why some of us like living out in the sticks.

John Schmalzbauer makes much the same point that Obama was substantively wrong about rural voters, but he's pissier about it:

As an Obama supporter and a sociologist, I was disappointed to see my candidate draw on an outdated and reductionist approach to religion and culture. Earlier this week, historian Leo Ribuffo noted the parallels between Obama’s comments and the mid-century analysis of the radical right by such figures as Seymour Martin Lipset, Daniel Bell, David Riesman, and Richard Hofstadter. Though an important part of American intellectual history, their social psychological explanations have not stood the test of time. A more serious concern than sociological fashion is the tendency of such arguments to trivialize complex moral and religious worlds. By reducing the religion of rural Pennsylvanians to mere economic frustration, Obama failed to take seriously the complicated ways people think and talk about their deepest commitments. According to Ribuffo, this was also a flaw of the political sociology of the early 1960s, which dismissed “Church attendance, ethnic solidarity, and other allegedly atavistic behavior . . . as social-psychological symptoms devoid of any sensible rationale.”

Oh, honestly. Schmalzbauer can get bent. With the smarmy possible exception of Mike Huckabee, Obama has consistently demonstrated the deepest command of religious dynamics among this year's crop of candidates. I sincerely doubt there was any reductive intent behind his comments, nor are they reflective of some deeper misunderstanding of religion among progressives. What he was saying was clear enough: because rural voters aren't able to make progress on economic issues, they turn to social issues for political expression. That may be factually incorrect, but it has been a widely-held misperception up until this episode, and it doesn't appear to have hurt Obama in Pennsylvania.

And what, really, is the alternative? The raison d'etre of Hillary Clinton's candidacy seems have been reduced to: Barack Obama has been occasionally technically incorrect in his public statements. McCain has nothing to offer rural voters, spiritually, economically, or politically. So to ask if Obama is going for a "politics of cynicism" or "a politics of hope" is to fall prey to a substanceless rhetorical trap. Dude meant that the kind of people who live in rural Central Pennsylvania or rural Central Wisconsin could use some economic lift. That's the plain meaning. Sociologists or political opponents who can't get hold of that need to spend some time out in the Polka Nation with the hicks to get some perspective.

*Yes, there's Madison. There's always Madison.