Gray Lady Seeks Fainting Couch After Meeting Flyover Country 'Bumpkins'

“The NYT has had enough of you bumpkins deciding elections,” Jazz Shaw writes at Hot Air on Mark Leibovitch’s “Bumpkinification of the Midterm Elections,” which, as we mentioned yesterday, reveals far more about the worldview of the author and his publication than the GOP candidates such as Joni Ernst and Mike McFadden that he profiles. As Jazz writes:

Leon Wolf, writing at Redstate, has a fairly effective takedown of these attacks, identifying the fact that what these elite culture warriors truly hate more than anything else is having to live on a patch of land which is attached to the flyover states where the annoying, unwashed masses reside. But more to the point, it should be noted that these campaign messages are effective for a reason, and it’s not a negative one. These “bumpkins” which Leibovitch so casually dismisses as being unworthy of participating in a modern democracy are, in fact, representative of a large swath of the nation. There are still people who actually live in farm country and maintain the values he so cheerily derides. There are people working in factories and mills – at least those few who can still find jobs – and get up every day worrying about problems which probably seem quaint, if not fictional, to those who spend their lives living in Manhattan, D.C. or Hollywood.

If Joni Ernst does pull this off and win on Tuesday, the commentariat may have learned a valuable lesson. Advertisements featuring people working on farms, castrating hogs, emptying trash cans or nailing shingles on the roofs of homes actually do work, and not because the viewers are stupid bumpkins. It’s because real people would prefer to be represented in Congress by someone who understands and can relate to their own lives.

Sorry, not holding my breath on that one, Jazz. As somebody said on Twitter the other day, Republicans are Charlie Brown, Democrats are Lucy; and they’re not going to stop pulling back the football at the last second no matter how much it alienates everyone else. The coastal elite Democrats’  hatred of flyover country is a cultural divide that transcends political parties and goes back decades — just ask Lyndon Johnson.