Barack Obama said, at a fundraiser in San Francisco on Sunday, explaining working class voters’ frustrations, “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, 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.”
How profound! How compassionate! How condescending!
What is really mind-boggling though, is reading the comments on the above linked SFGate.com blog post. Over half of the commenters have no idea why anyone would consider his remarks to be offensive. After all, Obama is just telling the truth. Why would anyone be offended? The commenters are not being sarcastic or ironic. They really don’t know.
UPDATE: Shortly after I posted this, SFGate.com took the link off the front page and replaced it with an AP article that downplays what Obama said and features his apologia. The links above have been revised to point to the original blog post and comments.