I think he's saying that if you're going to fight, there's got to be a point to it.

A couple of days ago, the headline on virtually every news programme here was Barack Obama's speech at a fund-raiser in California, ahead of the May 5 Pennsylvania primary. He said, "You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

That comment hit a nerve. Americans pride themselves on a long memory, never forgetting the workingman backbone that, in their mythos, holds this country together. "If I had a hammer" and all this. Predictably, after that speech, Obama was seen as unpatriotic. Bill Kristol wrote an op-ed in the NYT on what he calls Obama's "supercilious disdain" for small-town America.

Maybe because I'm not American, I heard something different. I remember feeling impressed, and thinking here was a leader who can see outside of himself. He is reminding his people to emerge from their small-town-mindedness; the insular parochialism that all of them must grow out of, if they are to understand the larger world they live in. It doesn't matter that they're from California, the third biggest economy in the world (true at one point, I don't know if it's still true now), or from hard-scrabble, coal-mining Pennsylvania. The lesson is the same for all.

It is elitist, and maybe a bit disdainful-sounding. But someone had to say it -- to remind people that it's worthless to be patriotic, religious and fiercely independent if there's no point to it.

Many Malaysians are projecting Obama's charisma on to some of our own politicians, and I don't know whether its wishful thinking or if it's really warranted. But there are parallels between what's wrong in our country and what's "wrong" in small-town America. Large pockets of insularity abound in Malaysia, that's for certain. For that reason, some of the messages that Obama directs at his own folk is also true for ours.