Don’t miss this post by Josh Marshall, which says the Clintons have said things in private about the unwashed masses of small towns that were far less charitable than what Obama said publicly.
The Clinton campaign tried to capitalize on Bittergate by handing out “I’m not bitter” stickers. MSNBC reports that the Clintons tried to claim that the stickers were a spontaneous grassroots phenomenon, but later admitted that they, um, had them printed and passed them out.
I like this bit from the MSNBC story:
But the issue doesn’t seem to be sticking. Clinton himself has been silent on the issue. But at the first two events of the day, the campaign has sent one of Carolina’s hometown boys out to push the issue before Clinton takes the stage. Tom Hendrickson, a Clinton supporter and former Democratic Party chairman, included a reading of Obama’s comments in his introduction of Clinton.
“Senator Obama, don’t pity us and think that we’re bitter and frustrated,” he said in Winterville this morning. “We are hard-working family folks who are smart, and we get it. We don’t need pundits to tell us what to think.”
Hendrickson repeated the sentiment at a later stop in Winston, but dropped the direct mention of Obama as the source of the quote.
In both instances, Hendrickson’s speech evidenced little reaction from the crowd, which had been waiting for the main event for over an hour, and appeared to have little tolerance for a parade of surrogates.
By the third stop of the day in Goldsboro, Hendrickson did not even take the stage.
Maybe folks don’t need pundits to tell them what to think, but I take it folks also don’t need Clinton surrogates to tell them what they feel.
Jay Sherman/sketpcial reporter: How do you sleep at night?
Rainer Wolfcastle/Hilary Clinton: On top of a pile of money with many beautiful guns and Bibles.
The scriptures say..”from an abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks”. Using God’s inerrant holy word as a guiding light to shine the light of truth on Hillary’s Bosnia sniper episode, I can only rightfully conclude that Hillary’s heart is abundant with deceit.
Thank you Holy Spirit for protecting me from the snares of Satan, and the clutches of Hillary’s deceit… by the knowledge of your word.
I haven’t checked your links yet, but I’ve been trying to spread this idea, because I’m sure I’m right, and I think it’s important. Re: “far less charitable”, I don’t think what Obama was talking about was uncharitable at all.
I think he was talking about how people were voting.
How do you vote when the big issue (watching your jobs vanish) isn’t going to be dealt with? You find something else to vote for (or against). Guns. Religion. Immigration. Gay rights. Affirmative action.
What he is saying is, he thinks these folks don’t have their big issue to vote for any more, so they find something else to use to base their vote on. That’s what the “clinging” is referring to. Not clinging to it for *life*, but clinging to it as a *voting strategy*. That’s what the question was about, after all… how do you win their votes?
If you can’t vote for someone who will bring middle class jobs back to your home, what will you vote for? You’ll vote for some other issue that matters. You cling to an issue like guns, to determine how you vote. You’ll cling to an issue like religion, to determine how you vote.
I’d bet that if you phrased the question right (by which I mean, you give him the opportunity to explain what he meant, without leading him on *or* preventing him), he’d say that he wasn’t cutting on *people*, he was cutting on *political campaigns*. The voters haven’t been given “vote for me and I’ll help bring jobs back”. The voters have been given “vote for me, I’ll (keep gun rights safe/fight for Christian values/keep the icky gayfolk down/whatever)”.
And he thinks he can give them “I’ll try to bring the jobs back”.
“We don’t need pundits to tell us what to think.”
That may be true of ordinary people, but it certainly isn’t true of Hillary. She won’t commit to saying the sun rises in the east until she’s run it by her focus groups and DLC consultants.