Below The Beltway

The Obama campaign is doing the best it can to limit the damage from what some are calling “Bittergate”:

MUNCIE, Ind. — Senator Barack Obama on Saturday rebutted criticism that has enveloped his campaign over a comment he made last Sunday that many working-class voters are angry and bitter over economic conditions in America, and he told an audience here that his words were not meant to be insulting.

Many dispirited voters believe politicians will not solve their problems, Mr. Obama argued, so they base their votes on issues like religion, gun rights or same-sex marriage rather than voting for their economic interests. Democratic and Republican critics alike accused Mr. Obama, of Illinois, of being elitist and demeaning to working-class Americans.

“Now, I didn’t say it as well as I should have,” Mr. Obama said, speaking to hundreds of Indiana voters at a rally on Saturday. “Because the truth is that these traditions that are passed on from generation to generation, those are important, that’s what sustains us. But what is absolutely true is that people don’t feel like they are being listened to.”

(…)

“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,” Mr. Obama said Saturday. “They are angry, they feel like they’ve been left behind. They feel like nobody’s paying attention to what they’re going through.”

As the audience listened nearly in silence, he added: “So I said, well you know, when you’re bitter, you turn to what you can count on. So people vote, 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.”

No, Senator, the natural response, the response that you keep missing, is all that these same people want to do is just live their lives the best the can, help each other, and not worry about some savior with no real experience coming down upon them from Chicago.

But I guess living in the big city you don’t notice stuff like that.

For what it’s worth, here’s the video:

Like the Times article said, there almost no response from the audience. No Obamamania going on in Muncie, apparently.

But, you know, that’s just because they’re bitter small-towners.