Obama, allies try to explain away “bitter” remarks

This really doesn’t cut it. Both he and his allies are completely ignoring the worst parts of his remarks, which were:

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily 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. 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.

Now, I’m just getting caught back up on the weekend news, but I’ve yet to see either him or his allies address that part of what he said to the m/billionaire group he addressed two weeks ago. Going by the Political Punch link, it would appear to me that they are deliberately not addressing it.

Captain Ed writes in response:

Had he just stopped there [at saying Pennsylvanians were just bitter], he would have had an arguable point. Unfortunately, he didn’t stop there — and he revealed the snobby, elitist view of middle America that is held by the hard Left. Perhaps more media outlets allow him this defense because they also don’t understand the offensive and snobbish nature of the remarks that follow.

I think even if the mediots don’t get it, and it’s quite possible that they don’t considering how their elitist view matches that of the left most of the time, I think Barack Obama himself is smart enough to know what was really offensive about what he said and as a result is in spin mode, changing the context of what he said as though it was somehow complimentary of “bitter” Pennsylvanians:

“What I meant was something that I don’t think any of us can argue with, which is that people feel abandoned, after 20 or 25 years of plants closing, jobs not coming back. People feel like Washington’s not listening to them, and as a consequence, they find that they can only rely on the traditions and the things that have been important to them for generation after generation. Faith. Family. Traditions like hunting. And they get frustrated.”

Is this guy a spinmaestro or what?