It was far more important to understand the motivations of middle class frustration than know the price of Belgium endive, but instead of opening a discussion about the frustration of people suffering in the once-thriving manufacturing areas of our country, Obama opened himself to huge criticism.  So much for being the man of the people.

But this  Op-Ed in Newsday by Dale Maharidge, an associate professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, argues that while Obama’s words may have stung, and struck an unpopular chord with true believers, that doesn’t mean they weren’t valid.

There’s a 600 or so mile-wide swath of the nation, just west of New York City reaching past Chicago and south to New Orleans, bypassed by the so-called boom of the 1990s. In 2000, at the peak of the alleged good times, I traveled across this region and found working people in suburban houses as desperate as the unwilling hobos of the early 1980s.

Workers have lower real wages in inflation-adjusted dollars while the rich have amassed record wealth. They endure higher tax rates than hedge fund managers. They subsidize bailouts for Wall Street titans.

I saw their anger slowly building over the last 25 years. This was allowed to happen because policy-makers, both Democrat and Republican, ignored the working class.

According Maharidge, these people are indeed angry and frustrated, and lash out at whatever they can to explain why their circumstances are so bad and intractable. 

Of course the anger doesn’t always come out in xenophobia, against gays, against immigrants – as Obama says, “antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” But it does for many. This reaction is as old as humanity. It can be a dangerous brew. We know how this anger played out in Weimar Germany – Hitler exploited it for his political gain.

While we may not, as a nation, want to admit this happens because it makes us appear petty and unseemly, are we ignoring a reality in the name of political correctness?  The knee-jerk reaction of the media was to castigate Obama, to blindly accept that his analysis was wrong.  Why?  Sometimes unpleasant words reveal an unpleasant reality, but a reality nonetheless.

By denying that there is any merit to Obama’s observations, we foreclose any discussion about the root causes of anger and frustration, and its misdirect blame toward immigrants, gays, whoever.  Blaming someone else, someone reachable, is the common reaction to frustration.  It’s not like steelworkers can do anything about hedge fund managers who make billion dollar bonuses.  But they can direct their hatred toward the immigrants who they wrongly rationalize are stealing their jobs.

When they do get angry enough to do something, they don’t turn left. The Center for New Community in Chicago counts 37 anti-immigrant or white-power “hate” groups in Pennsylvania. But their membership, the exact number not known, is really very small. Most workers, even if angry, simply endure.

Obama was brave to talk about the anger. But to convince the working class to vote for him, he will have to firmly address their needs – labor laws tilted in their favor, new green-collar jobs, a good health care program, and so on.

What’s unfortunate is that this is yet another discussion that we, as a society, need to have.  We need to clear the air, understand what the real problems are, divorced from the simplistic solutions born of misguided anger and frustration, if we are to find real solutions.  If politicians are perpetually guided by propounding popular solutions based on what pleases the greatest number of voters, even though they are based on misguided notions of who the voters hate the most today, we will get nowhere.

It’s hard to blame Hillary Clinton for trying to take advantage of Obama’s comments, as she wants to win a primary.  On the other hand, she’s a smart woman and knows better.  She knows that Obama had an important point, and still bolstered the elitist claim to gain advantage for herself at the expense of an important discussion.

But the media has no excuse for going along with this nonsense, joining (starting?) the feeding frenzy against Obama.  While I am not an Obama supporter, the castigation of his ideas means that we will lose yet another important chance to figure out how to fix an economy that has fundamental problems.  Another instance where a worthy discussion never happened, and we will all suffer for it.