…run down the working class, that is. Evan Sayet:

…So Bruce Springsteen endorsed Barack Obama. No surprise there for Springsteen and Obama share the same elitist and disdainful view of working class America.

Am I really saying that Springsteen, “the champion of the working man,” holds the people he sings about in ill-regard? Absolutely. In fact, he, like Obama, always has. Springsteen’s songs may be populated with working class people in working class towns — just as Obama might talk about their hopes and their dreams — but his description of them like Obama’s is unfailingly insulting, condescending and even hateful.

Time and again Springsteen describes Middle America as a place of unmitigated horrors. “Babe this town rips the bones from your back,” he screams in his iconic “Born to Run,” embellishing this by saying small town America is “a death trap,” and “a suicide rap.”

In “Thunder Road” Springsteen is desperately trying to escape a “town full of losers,” while in “Sandy (Fourth of July)” he describes the denizens of small town America as having “stony faces” and as people “left stranded” in America (on the Fourth of July, no less). In Springsteen’s cartoonish vision of small town America everyone is a rube who rides the “tilt-a-whirl” and is condemned to “never get off…”

What makes Springsteen believe that small town America is “full of losers” is the same thing that makes the elitist Obama think so: unlike them, these people have jobs.