You tell the truth in a Presidential race, you get in trouble.

You lie through your teeth about dodging bullets in Bosnia, you make a joke about it and move on.

That’s where we’re at in this fun-house mirror of a campaign.

I’ve got no problem with the content of what Obama said.

Working people have taken it on the chin over the last 20 years, with falling standards of living and rising fears of losing their jobs, not being able to pay for health care, and not being able to afford to send their children to college.

For decades, Republicans have assiduously exploited people’s discontent by appealing to social issues so they will vote against their economic self-interest. That’s why, in campaign after campaign, Republican strategists have told their candidates to play up guns, gays, God, and abortion. That’s why they’ve consistently shuffled the race card, and seized on the immigration issue.

Truth be told, it’s not only Republicans who have bent the racial bar to appeal to the white working class. Bill Clinton was a master at this: He conspicuously took a break from the 1992 campaign trail to return to Arkansas so he could execute a mentally retarded African American name Rickie Ray Rector. And his “end welfare as we know it” pledge (which, to his eternal shame, he made good on) was nothing but an updated version of Ronald Reagan’s welfare queen. While I’m at it, Obama himself has not been a profile of courage on this issue, either, endorsing Clinton’s welfare “reform” law. He told The New York Times on April 11: “Before welfare reform, you had, in the minds of most American, a stark separation between the deserving working poor and the undeserving welfare poor. What welfare reform did was desegregate those two groups. Now, everybody was poor, and everybody had to work.” And with the economy tanking now, and with the safety net shredded by the welfare law, almost everybody is going to get poorer.

On substance, the only disturbing note I heard in Obama’s controversial Pennsylvania comment was that “anti-trade sentiment” was also a diversion from the source of people’s economic insecurity. Actually, opposing NAFTA and other free trade agreements is a rational hill to fight, especially for blue collar workers.

Now Obama has already confessed that he spoke inelegantly, and I’m sure he knows imprudently.

But compare his faux pas with Hillary Clinton’s faux bullets.

Let’s be real here.