Clinton's team also argued that Obama's gaffe showed that he would be no stronger than Clinton in helping Democrats win congressional seats in November, particularly in rural or small-town districts where races will be tight.
Obama's San Francisco remarks, first published by the Huffington Post website, have drawn scorn from the Republican Party and its presumptive nominee, Sen. McCain of Arizona.
Obama told donors at the fundraiser: "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 going to regenerate and they have not. So it's not surprising, then, that 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."
On Saturday, Obama backtracked.
"Obviously, if I worded things in a way that made people offended, I deeply regret that," he told the Winston-Salem Journal of North Carolina.
Campaigning in Muncie, Ind., Obama called the controversy interesting.
"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 hometown in Illinois, who are bitter," Obama told the crowd.
"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, or they get frustrated about how things are changing. That's a natural response.
"And now, I didn't say it as well as I should have, because you know the truth is that these traditions that are passed on from generation to generation, those are important."
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michael.finnegan @latimes.com
