Obama patronises Pennsylvania
These words that Barack Obama delivered at a fund-raiser in San Francisco are going to haunt him for the rest of his presidential campaign. They give the Republicans the opening they craved to portray Obama as an elitist—a Columbia and Harvard educated constitutional law professor who doesn’t understand how the rest of America lives. "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."
There are several political problems with what Obama said. First, it is rather offensive to suggest that people’s faith is a result of their bitterness. Second, Obama is suggesting that voters are allowed themselves to be manipulated when they vote their values.
Both the McCain and Clinton campaigns have jumped all over the quote. For the McCain campaign the quote is particularly useful as it will help them in their effort to peel off working class Democratic voters, who are still backing Hillary by a considerable margin, in the fall and gee up the right—who remain sceptical of McCain—for the contest to come.