Obama tries to temper ‘bitter’ comment

Barack Obama struggled yesterday to fend off a barrage of criticism for saying small-town voters were “bitter” and clinging to guns and religion — remarks that the senator’s opponent, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, harshly denounced as elitist and demeaning.

Mr. Obama, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, apologized for choosing his words poorly at the closed-door San Francisco fundraiser, and he somewhat backed off his characterization of gun owners and churchgoers.

“I didn’t say it as well as I should have,” the Illinois senator said at a campaign rally at Ball State University in Indiana while dismissing it as “a typical sort of political flare-up because I said something that everybody knows is true.”

Later in the afternoon, he made an apology in an interview with a North Carolina newspaper, although it was phrased in the conditional and he stood by his substantive point.

“Obviously, if I worded things in a way that made people offended, I deeply regret that,” he told the Winston-Salem Journal, but “the underlying truth of what I said remains, which is simply that people who have seen their way of life upended because of economic distress are frustrated and rightfully so.”

Mr. Obama was contrite after a furor began late Friday when his remarks at a closed-door San Francisco fund-raiser were first posted on the Huffington Post Web site. The criticism grew yesterday to dominate the weekend political news cycle and the conversation on political Web sites.

Mrs. Clinton, campaigning in Indiana yesterday, made her strongest rebuke yet of Mr. Obama, saying the remarks are “demeaning, elitist and they are out of touch.”

She said Americans own guns because they hunt or believe in gun rights, and they go to church because they believe in God — not because they are desperately clinging to antiquated views.

“Americans who believe in the Second Amendment believe it’s a matter of constitutional right. Americans who believe in God believe it’s a matter of personal faith,” she said. “The people of faith I know don’t ‘cling’ to religion because they’re bitter. People embrace faith, not because they are materially poor but because they are spiritually rich.”

She also said that “I don’t think it helps to divide our country into one America that is enlightened and one that is not. … People don’t need a president who looks down on them.”

Mr. Obama made the “bitter” remark at a private fundraising event in San Francisco last week in response to a question about why he was trailing Mrs. Clinton in Pennsylvania.

“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 [has] replaced them,” he said. “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.”

The furor highlighted several long-perceived weaknesses for Mr. Obama — a general air of aloofness, problems with religion highlighted by the flap over the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., and an inability to connect with white working-class voters — doubts that the Clinton campaign sought to play up yesterday in several ways.

Chief campaign strategist Geoffrey Garin said on the liberal Web site Talking Points Memo that “these are the kinds of attitudes that have created a gulf between Democrats and lots of small-town and heartland voters.”

“They will be damaging, and they could be significantly so,” he said, adding that “the people who are most likely to be offended by this are also the most likely to be swing voters in general elections.”

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