Good post, good Dickens quote, good comments! As someone who has to travel through small towns and rural areas in many states regularly, I’d like to digress just a little. Obama and his SF listeners seem to take it for granted that outside the blue state cities, it’s all Rust Belt despair, the economy is comatose, everybody’s hurtin’ bad like Allentown in the Billy Joel song. This simply does not correspond with the reality I see, where unemployment is usually 5% or less and has been for ten years, the Help Wanted/Join Our Team/Now Hiring signs and banners are pretty much permanent, Main Street is being torn up and redone with decorative cobblestones, the parking lots of Home Depot and Lowe’s are full of new cars, and the latest Starbucks is opening with a special on pumpkin spice lattes. Now I work mostly in the western states, but I’ve seen what I just described from California to Texas to Wisconsin to Washington state. How different can it be in Pennsylvania?