And here’s Helen:

Am I bitter? Yes I am. I’m bitter that the WIFE of a politician makes a little over $100,000 at her job but once her husband is elected her SALARY goes up to over $300,000!!!! I’m bitter that people who are making at least a HALF a million dollars a YEAR only give 1% to charity and that the charity who received most of that 1% is a church that speaks about racism and hating America! I’m bitter that the same politician can speak about me like I’m a second class citizen because I don’t earn enough money.

Bitter? You bet I am!! But it’s not because I cling to my religion or want to own a gun! It’s because high class politicians come out of nowhere and INSULT me and my intelligence!

And here’s Jenn:

I live in “small town America.” When one of the largest employers of our area, Phillips, an electronic manufacturing plant, relocated to Mexico people became bitter and frustrated, they turned to their faith and those rights they could protect. Many opted for early retirement, sacrificing their level of retirement pay in order to keep their health insurance. Any presidential nominee that says people in small town America are not bitter and clinging to the things that bring them comfort have not spoken to these retirees who ended up losing their health insurance anyway. To say that these people are not bitter demonstrates a candidate’s lack of empathy for small town Americans.

Not to be too “gee, look what the Internet lets us do” about it—but BitterGate makes a telling example of the interactivity of the Web compensating for a basic deficiency in traditional newsgathering. The comments are certainly worth a read; they flesh out, in ways that many traditional news outlets have not, the voter attitudes those latter outlets were (nominally) attempting to illuminate. Still, they beg as many questions as they answer: is this where Web journalism is going—a corollary to the whole Mullet Strategy of Web posting? Is the voter perspective getting edged out of stories in favor of expert analysis, with the former relegated to the party-in-the-back of the Comments section? Are we seeing a democratization of political analysis—or the opposite? Will the User-on-the-Web soon render the Man-on-the-Street obsolete?

As Laura Ingle might say, “This should be interesting….stay tuned.”

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