Obama's Big Bad Boo-Boo

Barack Obama tried to justify his condescending comments about those "bitter" Pennsylvanians.

It hasn't worked, so he determined that it was time to stop the bleeding by acknowledging he didn't phrase his remarks as well as he should have.

That sounds arrogant, too. He only slightly stepped back from his comments.

Just as in the case of the Rev. Wright matter, Obama is hedging.

Do you know what this means?

It means that Obama may need to deliver a dramatic, media-hyped major speech on American bitterness to smooth things over, like his racial understanding speech, supposedly one of the greatest speeches ever made since human beings strung words together to make sentences.

When backed against a wall, he gives a "courageous" speech. He tells Americans what we need to hear, like only Obama the Great can.

Right.

MUNCIE, Ind. -- Democrat Barack Obama on Saturday conceded that comments he made about bitter working class voters who "cling to guns or religion" were ill chosen, as he tried to stem a burst of complaints that he is condescending.

"I didn't say it as well as I should have," he said.

As Obama tried to quell the furor, presidential rival Hillary Rodham Clinton hit him with one of her lengthiest and most pointed criticisms to date.

"Senator Obama's remarks were elitist and out of touch," she said, campaigning about an hour away in Indianapolis. "They are not reflective of the values and beliefs of Americans."

...The comments, posted on the Huffington Post political Web site Friday, set off a storm of criticism from Clinton, Republican nominee-in-waiting John McCain and other GOP officials. It threatened to highlight an Obama Achilles heel — the image that the Harvard-trained lawyer is arrogant, aloof and carries himself with an air of superiority.

His campaign scrambled to defuse possible damage caused with working class voters that Obama needs to win in upcoming primaries in Pennsylvania and Indiana.

"Lately there has been a little typical sort of political flare up because I said something that everybody knows is true, which is that there are a whole bunch of folks in small towns in Pennsylvania, in towns right here in Indiana, in my hometown in Illinois who are bitter," Obama said Saturday morning at Ball State University. "They are angry. They feel like they have been left behind. They feel like nobody is paying attention to what they're going through."

"So I said, well you know, when you're bitter you turn to what you can count on. So people, they vote about guns, or they take comfort from their faith and their family and their community. And they get mad about illegal immigrants who are coming over to this country."

After acknowledging that his previous remarks could have been better phrased, he added:

"The truth is that these traditions that are passed on from generation to generation, those are important. That's what sustains us. But what is absolutely true is that people don't feel like they are being listened to.

"And so they pray and they count on each other and they count on their families. You know this in your own lives, and what we need is a government that is actually paying attention. Government that is fighting for working people day in and day out making sure that we are trying to allow them to live out the American dream."

Blah, blah, blah.

That fact is Obama's "America sucks" shtick is flawed.

Sure, people are ready for change and the Constitution guarantees that we're going to get a change in leadership; but his negativity has come back to bite him.

His campaign taps into anger, rather than pride in the country.

...One of Clinton's staunchest supporters, Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., acknowledged there was some truth in Obama's remarks. But Republicans would use them against him anyway, Bayh said.

"We do have economic hard times, and that does lead to a frustration and some justifiable anger, it's true," Bayh told reporters after introducing Clinton in Indianapolis. "But I think you're on dangerous ground when you morph that into suggesting that people's cultural values whether it's religion or hunting and fishing or concern about trade are premised solely upon those kinds of anxieties and don't have a legitimate foundation independent of that."

True.

Obama screwed up royally.

In a way, I think his comments to the San Francisco millionaires may do more damage to him than the days and weeks (and months?) of Rev. Jeremiah Wright's racist, anti-Semitic, anti-American remarks being played in an endless loop.

When Obama personally berated the values of Americans, he attacked something sacred-- the American soul and freedom.