Making such an extraordinarily elitist statement demonstrates a candidate who is completely out of touch with the electorate in PA and the rest of the country, and the actions and statements made since then have only made it worse. Pennsylvanians and other Americans will not elect a president who so obviously looks down on them!
There is absolutely no way these disastrous comments will not lead to the complete and permanent downfall of the campaign
of Hillary Rodham Clinton.
This diary started life as a comment, but I thought it was worth expanding, because it really is important and even here everyone seems to be missing it.
The whole "bittergate" flap was a disastrous mistake by Clinton, and NOT by Obama.
The commentary that I read keeps talking about how it "hasn't done damage" to Obama, or how he's "recovering well", or how there might be a "backlash" against Clinton from it. All of which buys into the punditocracy's framing of the issue, which is the very last thing we should be doing!
Let's review.
Obama makes a clumsily worded statement of obvious truth.
People in PA and around the country recognize the truth he is speaking, are grateful to hear him speaking in an understanding way about their plight.
Clinton and McCain pounce, calling Obama "elitist" and "out of touch". Clinton goes so far as to say that she sees people in Pennsylvania and elsewhere as "optimistic", in flat contradiction to every poll that shows that unprecedented numbers of Americans feel the country is going in the wrong direction.
The punditry joins in the pouncing and plays the story over and over for days making it absolutely impossible for anyone to miss the fact that Obama said these things and Clinton and McCain think he was out of touch for doing so.
The reaction of the voters is completely predictable. If one candidate says something you agree with, and two others say "he's out of touch!" it doesn't matter that the pundits are all agreeing with the latter two. The voters know perfectly well who's out of touch, and the more the story gets played, the more voters get to see the obvious.
This isn't like the Wright thing, where if you did a bit of research you could find it was much ado about nothing but the instinctive visceral reaction was negative for Obama. In this case the instinctive reaction to Obama's comments is "he's right" and the instinctive reaction to Clinton's response is "what the fuck kind of fantasy world does she live in?".
So no, it's NOT true that Bittergate "hasn't done damage". It's doing damage on a daily basis.
Nobody's "recovering well" - the damage is ongoing if slow and shows no sign of stopping.
And there will be no "backlash" against Clinton because there was no "lash" there in the first place.
Both Gallup and Rasmussen show her numbers falling and Obama's rising since this began. I see no way they will ever recover - this episode has made the way she feels about voters and her lack of connection with them completely apparent.
"Bittergate" is a campaign-ending gaffe - for Clinton.