Obama Hurts Chances With Negative Statements On Small Town Voters
Senator Barack Obama may have seriously hurt his chances at securing his place in the Presidential nomination this week with certain negative remarks he made towards small towns in Pennsylvania and their citizens while at a private fundraiser in San Francisco. The Huffington Post published his comments Friday, “You go into 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 going to 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.”
After drawing limited media attention on Saturday, the remarks began to generate a furor yesterday, and continued to reverberate in the latest news cycle, drowning out the candidates’ appearance at the faith and compassion forum at Messiah College yesterday. USA Today reports Sen. Hillary Clinton and her allies yesterday went on the offensive, charging that Obama’s comments “showed him to be elitist and vulnerable to the kind of Republican attacks that have sunk Democratic candidates in the past.”
ABC World News reported in its lead story last night, “Here in Pennsylvania, Hillary Clinton is seeking to redefine Obama as a champion of the politics of bitterness.” Clinton said, “I think his comments were elitist and divisive. And the Democratic Party has been, unfortunately, viewed by many people over the last decades as being elitist and out of touch.” NBC Nightly News, also in its lead story, reported Obama’s “recent depiction of small town voters as bitter and clinging to guns and religion is reverberating loudly on the campaign trail tonight. And while Obama admits those words were not well chosen, the Hillary Clinton campaign has made it the centerpiece of a new round of attacks.” ”
The AP reports Clinton “tried to portray herself as an ally of the middle class on Sunday by keeping alive Barack Obama’s comments about bitter voters in small towns while taking her campaign door to door” in Scranton. Clinton said, “Senator Obama has not owned up to what he said and taken accountability for it. What people are looking for is an explanation. What does he really believe? How does he see people here in this neighborhood, throughout Pennsylvania, Indiana, North Carolina, other places in our country?”