But the poor guy—who works on his feet—can’t afford knee surgery, and you still say that’s not evidence enough of having a difficult life. I can’t believe you really think that.

I’m not denying that the family might be in a difficult situation, and I’m fully aware of the cost of health care. I don’t envy their situation — I just doubt whether it has any probative value.
And I am skeptical (maybe a bit cynical) about the “snacks” thing. It doesn’t seem like an appropriate example to demonstrate economic difficulty. The limited detail about their financial woes leave plenty of room for interpretation, and perhaps mine has been colored by other things. Maybe I compare them to my own situation (in which I do actually lay out over a quarter of my annual income for one thing). My point is that if their difficulties are 1. expensive health care, and 2. fewer snacks, then it sounds too much like a sob story.
Healthcare is expensive for everyone. Suppose the man hurt his knee three years ago. Surgery would still have been expensive, maybe up to 25% of his income. But in the “better” economic times 3 (or 10) years ago, they could afford snacks. So it would appear that the major difference between then and now is the loss of snacks. Or am I misreading it?
Finally, I find it helpful to recall the broader context. Most people in the world would be thrilled to trade places with this family, bum knee and all. The video seems to imply that the family’s loss is profound, but it’s not. Unpleasant, sure. Potentially difficult, absolutely. But compared to what many people live with, it looks pretty nice.

The premise of the segment (at least from my point of view) was that the family was having to endure unusual economic stress, and that stress is tracable to Republican economic policies. Health care is expensive, but it’s not completely the Republicans’ fault.

Obama didn’t say it was “completely the Republicans’ fault” (emphasis added):

Obama:We’ve seen over the last eight years how decisions by a president can have a profound effect on the course of history . and on American lives.

But much that’s wrong in our country goes back even farther than that. We’ve been talking about the same problems for decades . and nothing is ever done to solve them.

Maybe it would have been more convincing and less insulting if they had found something other than snacks to couple with the surgery.

If the family’s problem were “limited to fewer snacks,” then I would agree that it would be trivial. But the poor guy—who works on his feet—can’t afford knee surgery, and you still say that’s not evidence enough of having a difficult life. I can’t believe you really think that.

I’m not saying that Obama has the right solution to these problems, but no one can deny that health care has become more costly for most Americans, in many cases prohibitively so. It’s a real problem that isn’t addressed by bloviating about how the injured persons are “fat and lazy” and “a bunch of whinners [sic].”

The sample family according to the video lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where the median income is $46,012, and the average cost of ACL repair is $11,500. I suspect that even those who were to take up Sara’s suggestion to sell their Ford minivans, ride the bus everywhere, and trim their nails would have great difficulty laying out about a quarter of their annual income on any one item.

I don’t want to bash the family at the beginning, and I wouldn’t wish economic hardship on them. But if their difficulty is limited to fewer snacks (or rationing them out over a week), I confess that I’m less sympathetic.

What about the part where they put off surgery because they couldn’t afford it?

Of course, McCain may be prone to overdo this kind of rhetoric. William McGurn and John Fund both recently noted in the Wall Street Journal that McCain already tends to shoot from the hip for moral judgments.

That’s interesting, because recently I’ve read both David Brooks and George Will make similar points: basically that John McCain doesn’t operate by political theory so must as attempt to cast everything as a moral crusade.

I think they’re right, and it’s illustrated by yesterday’s declaration that he is going to suspend his campaign until Congress works out the economic crisis.

By the way, your text analysis reminded me of this software analysis of “spin”:

Each of the candidates had made speeches containing very high and very low levels of spin, according to Skillicorn’s program, depending on the occasion. In general though, Obama’s speeches contain considerably higher spin than either McCain or Clinton. For example, for their speeches accepting their party’s nomination for president, Obama’s speech scored a spin value of 6.7 - where 0 is the average level of spin within all the political speeches analysed, and positive values represent higher spin. In contrast, McCain’s speech scored -7.58, while Hillary Clinton’s speech at the Democratic National Convention scored 0.15. Skillicorn also found that Sarah Palin’s speeches contain slightly more spin than average.