WASHINGTON — Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton warned Sunday that ordinary voters may see Sen. Barack Obama as "out of touch" and removed from everyday concerns, trying to equate her rival with the Democratic nominees who were beaten in the last two presidential elections.
Obama lashed back, accusing Clinton of practicing the kind of politics in which "we tear each other down."
Making back-to-back appearances Sunday night in a televised forum on faith and values, the Democratic rivals continued the escalating fight over a recent comment in which Obama said, among other things, that embittered small-town voters "cling to guns or religion."
Clinton suggested that Obama's remark, which was made at a San Francisco fundraising event, was fresh evidence that he could not win the general election in the fall.
She cast the comment as "elitist, out of touch and, frankly, patronizing," and then drew a comparison with the last two Democratic presidential standard-bearers. Although she did not mention former Vice President Al Gore or Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry by name, Clinton said that "large segments of the electorate concluded that they did not really understand, or relate to, or frankly respect their ways of life.
"And I think that is an issue for the voters."
Gore and Kerry faced criticism that they were too cerebral, arrogant or effete in their tastes to appeal to mainstream voters. Each lost to George W. Bush.
Obama followed Clinton on stage in CNN's "Compassion Forum" and called his remarks at the San Francisco event "clumsy." But he said he had not intended to dismiss the values of financially distressed families.
"My words may have been clumsy, which happens surprisingly often on a presidential campaign," Obama said.
"But this is something I've talked about before in my own life: religion as a bulwark, a foundation, when other things aren't going well."
The nationally televised forum at a college in Grantham, Pa., capped a weekend in which the two campaigns battled ferociously over the political import of Obama's words.
At the closed-door fundraising event, Obama, speaking of people living in small towns in Pennsylvania and the Midwest, said: "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."
