How many times have we all said, especially over the last seven-plus years: “If you’re not pissed-off, you’re not paying attention.”

So one can only wonder at the Clinton camp’s response when Barack Obama spoke to the fact that those who have been paying attention are pissed-off – and rightfully so.

Senator Clinton’s immediate reaction was not only to feign outrage that Obama had actually acknowledged the presence of the elephant in the room, but to go the further step of pretending that the elephant doesn’t even exist.

“That hasn’t been my experience,” she said of her travels through Pennsylvania. Hillary only sees happy, optimistic people who are willing to roll-up-their-sleeves – as though they have been lazily lounging in front of the afternoon soaps while their jobs disappeared – the inference being that people whose lives have been decimated by outsourcing, unfair trade deals, and government policies that leave working-class citizens in the dust while catering to the already-wealthy and the bottom-lines of corporations are too stupid to do anything but smile mindlessly in the midst of their plight.

Unfortunately for Hillary (as though she actually needed any more misfortune in her losing bid for the nomination), the people of Pennsylvania – along with people of every county, every state, every city, every small town – have been staring that elephant in the face for years, and are tired of hearing that it isn't there.

After all, they have been told by the absolute masters of denial – the Bush administration and the Republican party – that the economy is healthy, that unemployment is just a measure of the laziness of those who don’t want to work, that well-paying jobs are plentiful for those willing to slither off the welfare couch and snap them up, that the billions being wasted on an unwinnable war in Iraq have no impact on our economy and its growth, that everything is fine-and-dandy and that big, fat elephant in the room is only a figment of the imagination of those who are actively looking for something to bellyache about.

After years of the populace crying out for the truth, the man who actually speaks it is now being vilified by those whose who see the last chance of survival of their already-defeated candidate in a declaration that ignoring the truth is in the country’s best interest, that encouraging the silence of the downtrodden is an honorable means to an end, that ignoring the elephant – one that has been sucking the life’s blood out of American citizens for decades – is just the kind of happy-dappy rhetoric that will put Hillary in the White House at last.

What the Hillary campaign has, along with its surrogates and supporters, refused to accept is that the populace that has lived with that elephant for far too long realize that the first step in ridding ourselves of its presence is the blatant, unvarnished, unapologetic acknowledgment that it exists.

The sheer brilliance, and down-to-earth humanity, of Obama’s most recent remarks is the audacity to encourage the idea that if we all pull together, the immediate removal of the elephant is not only possible, but probable.

And that is music to the ears of those who have consistently been told via right-wing talking points – whether delivered by the GOP or by Hillary Clinton – that the true pursuit of happiness lies not in acknowledging the elephant, but in going about attempting to clean our collective house while pretending that the larger-than-life animal, along with its inevitable and ever-growing pile of excrement, just isn't there.