John McCain doesn’t want to call anyone names, but he makes clear what he thinks of Barack Obama’s commentary about small-town Midwesterners in this C-SPAN clip from this morning. McCain hasn’t sat on the sidelines over these comments, although he obviously hasn’t flooded the zone in the way Hillary Clinton has in her responses. Instead of attacking Obama, he focuses more on the values of these Americans:

That’s the kind of low-key, positive response at which McCain excels, at least publicly. Perhaps he doesn’t want to overplay his hand here, something Republicans have done in the past. I think it wouldn’t hurt to point out that most of the press have focused on the only portion of the statement that wasn’t terribly objectionable, and that neither they nor Obama have spoken about casting Midwestern voters as bible-thumping, gun-hugging bigots.