This letter to the Philadelphia Inquirer fascinated me:

David Reichenbacher
Philadelphia
This campaign is dragging on too long, forcing candidates and the media to make stories out of nonevents, like the definition of bitter. I'll tell you something, Hillary Clinton. I'm a Pennsylvanian, and I am bitter. Obama is in touch with us.

Painful?

Pain?

I can identify with that, because I have to drive to New Jersey and run around for the entire day, and there's nothing I hate more than being stuck in those awful suburban traffic jams. No seriously, it is pure pain. I don't want to go, and I'm delaying my departure by writing a blog post about the pain and bitterness I feel!

What would Freud say?

Back in the old days, we had a president who was elected for saying "I feel your pain."

"I feel your pain." Clinton looked at the unemployed man in the town hall debate forum... and many felt that was a crucial moment in his being elected. So much so that the phrase became a catch phrase of the 90's.

(Anyway, I can't decide who will best feel my pain right now, but I gotta go!)

MORE: Glenn Reynolds links a post about how Bill felt the pain of the little rural people back in 1995, after Hillary said "Screw 'em!"

In January 1995, as the Clintons were licking their wounds from the 1994 congressional elections, a debate emerged at a retreat at Camp David. Should the administration make overtures to working class white southerners who had all but forsaken the Democratic Party? The then-first lady took a less than inclusive approach.

"Screw 'em," she told her husband. "You don't owe them a thing, Bill. They're doing nothing for you; you don't have to do anything for them."

At that point, Clinton "stepped in, calm and judicious, not irritated, as if rehearsing an old but honorable debate he had been having with his wife for decades.":

I know how you feel. I understand Hillary's sense of outrage. It makes me mad too. Sure, we lost our base in the South; our boys voted for Gingrich. But let me tell you something. I know these boys. I grew up with them. Hardworking, poor, white boys, who feel left out, feel that our reforms always come at their expense. Think about it, every progressive advance our country has made since the Civil War has been on their backs. They're the ones asked to pay the price of progress. Now, we are the party of progress, but let me tell you, until we find a way to include these boys in our programs, until we stop making them pay the whole price of liberty for others, we are never going to unite our party, never really going to have change that sticks.