Speaking at a fundraiser in California last Sunday, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., made some potentially politically damaging remarks about rural jobless Pennsylvanians. The Huffington Post's Mayhill Fowler reports:
When he spoke to a group of his wealthier Golden State backers at a San Francisco fund-raiser last Sunday, Barack Obama took a shot at explaining the yawning cultural gap that separates a Turkeyfoot from a Marin County.
"You go into some of 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," Obama said.
"And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna 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."
Depending on how much coverage the comments get, it could be harmful to Sen. Obama, who has had a tough time courting white, rural working-class voters in the Keystone State. Surely not as big of a story (or as meaningful, I should say), as the Clinton campaign debacles over the Columbian Free Trade Agreement, but it makes for a much better sound bite.
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