After the remarks were reported by the liberal blog Huffington Post on Friday, Obama initially defended them, and on Saturday he continued to say the tenor of them was correct, even if the phrasing was off. He argued that Clinton and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), whose campaign also criticized the remarks, were turning something "everybody knows is true" into political fodder.
"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 home town in Illinois who are bitter," Obama said in Muncie. "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,' " he continued. "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 or they get frustrated about, you know, how things are changing. That's a natural response."
Inside Obama's inner circle, aides conceded they are not sure where the issue might lead, although it is likely to set the tone and raise the stakes of the Wednesday night debate between Clinton and Obama in Pennsylvania. They described Obama as frustrated with himself for word choices such as "cling" and references to hot-button issues including religion and guns, but also stunned at the uproar over what to him seemed a fundamental fact of American life. |
