At issue are comments Obama made privately at a fund-raiser in San Francisco last Sunday. He explained his troubles winning over working-class voters, saying they have become frustrated with economic conditions:
"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 antitrade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
The comments, posted on the Huffington Post political website Friday, set off a storm of criticism from Clinton, Republican nominee-in-waiting John McCain, and other GOP officials. It threatened to highlight an Obama weakness - the image that the Harvard-trained lawyer is arrogant and aloof.
His campaign scrambled to defuse possible damage caused with working-class voters that Obama needs to win in upcoming primaries in Pennsylvania and Indiana.
There has been a small "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 hometown in Illinois, who are bitter," Obama said yesterday morning at a town hall-style meeting at the university. "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. 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."
After acknowledging his previous remarks in California could have been better phrased, he added:
"The truth is that these traditions that are passed on from generation to generation, those are important. That's what sustains us. But what is absolutely true is that people don't feel like they are being listened to.
"And so they pray and they count on each other and they count on their families. You know this in your own lives, and what we need is a government that is actually paying attention."
