Obama seeks to explain 'guns or religion' remark
'I didn't say it as well as I should have,' senator says of his comment, first published on Huffington Post, about small-town attitudes. Clinton, McCain fan the controversy.
WASHINGTON — Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, known for his skills as an orator, conceded today that comments he made at a private San Francisco fundraiser about working-class Democrats clinging to "guns or religion" were poorly chosen.
"I didn't say it as well as I should have," he said. "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."
Seeking to defuse the damage among blue-collar Democrats essential to his chances in upcoming primaries in Pennsylvania and Indiana, Obama told a crowd in Muncie, Ind., that he only meant to show empathy.
"Lately, there's 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 hometown in Illinois, who are bitter," Obama said. "They are angry, they feel like they've been left behind. They feel like nobody's paying attention to what they're going through."
The controversy -- fanned by rivals Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain -- began when the Huffington Post website published remarks the Illinois senator made last weekend at a closed-door San Francisco fundraiser.
In those comments, Obama responded to a question about why his candidacy was struggling in Pennsylvania by saying that residents of some hard-pressed communities had grown bitter.
"You go into 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 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."
Fellow Democrat Clinton, campaigning in Pennsylvania ahead of the state's April 22 primary, seized on the remarks, suggesting that Obama was offering condescension rather than solutions. "Pennsylvania doesn't need a president who looks down on them," the New York senator said at a Philadelphia rally. "They need a president who stands up for them, who fights for them."
