Pat Dollard | Young Americans

Where’s the part in the video or written statement where he addresses the specifics of what he said? There isn’t one, because what he said is too self-damning. Instead he keeps it vague, offering an empty vessel of twisted rhetoric. Even Hillary got it right. Self-interest or not, she got it right: “People don’t need a President who looks down on them.” So did McCain.

Background: Hussein Attacks Heartland America For God, Guns And Racism

The Atlantic:
by Mark Ambinder

Republicans sense an opportunity in the developing storm over Barack Obama’s remarks.

His comments have been distributed to allies on Capitol Hill, to members of the Pennsylvania press corps, to talk radio hosts across the country, to Republican state parties and to the congressional campaign committees. The National Republican Congressional Committee is using the statement to whack Chris Carney, a vulnerable frosh member of congress from Pennsylvania. ((Note: contrary to an earlier sentence, he is neutral.))

Tommy Vietor, a campaign spokesman, was designated to give what the Obama campaign wants you to believe is a “ah, it’s not a big deal” response:

“Senator Obama has said many times in this campaign that Americans are understandably upset with their leaders in Washington for saying anything to win elections while failing to stand up to the special interests and fight for an economic agenda that will bring jobs and opportunity back to struggling communities. And if John McCain wants a debate about who’s out of touch with the American people, we can start by talking about the tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans that he once said offended his conscience but now wants to make permanent,”

Excerpted Thrashing From Politico:

The What’s the Matter with Pennsylvania reading still has its problems. For one, it is a refusal to take voters’ devotion to faith and guns at face value, psychologizing it instead.

He’s now saying, basically, that he meant his comments in the What’s the Matter with Kansas? sense — that he was arguing that economic insecurity and frustration have been displaced onto social issues. (A correspondent who was at the San Francisco fundraiser, Marcia Ewing, emails that he delivered a parallel diagnosis of the bitterness of inner cities.) So when he said that people “cling to guns or religion…as a way to explain their frustration,” he meant something along the lines of, “displace their feelings of economic insecurity onto fears of social change.” He was, he’s suggesting, talking about the politics of guns or religion, not the things themselves.

And even if it was what he meant, it isn’t what he said. What he did suggest, most problematically, is that there’s something wrong, or symptomatic, about clinging to your faith, or to your gun. It’s a suggestion that probably plays better in San Francisco (politically, the worst possible place to say it) than in the middle of the country.