Obama Meltdown: He Doesn't Get It

Well, either he doesn't get it, or he's trying to gloss over the biggest gaffe in his campaign (so far). The gaffe which is a gift to the Hillary campaign, or in the event of a Barack win, will be a continuing gift to the John McCain campaign.

David Knowles posted Barack's response to his incredible comments about bitterness in small town America and what that bitterness leads to (religion, guns, anti-trade, and anti-immigrant sentiment). And while his response was typically great Obama Rhetoric, He only really defended calling small town America "bitter". What he didn't defend is saying that small town America wouldn't be such racist bible-thumping rednecks if they only had jobs. And that's why he's in hot water.

A sampling of reaction from the blogs...

VDH parses the statement line by line and finds it chock full of goodness... for McCain and Clinton, here's the gun line:

3. "They cling to guns or religion". This is revealing for two reasons: one, Obama has been trying to finesse his position on guns to appeal precisely to gun owners and thus we start to see that his repositioning is cynical to the core; two, "cling to religion?" No rural Pennsylvanian clings to religion more than Obama himself, who for 20 years sat silent in the pews, while a hate-spewing minister damned his country and most everyone else. The question is not why Pennsylvanians "cling to their religion", but why do the Obamas still cling to the Trinity Church that seems far more extreme than anything I've seen in rural America.

Hotline on call judges the detonation level:

It's united in sentiment and spin the unlikeliest of people, Hillary Clinton and Grover Norquist.

It's distracted from two dominant news stories that Clinton hasn't been able to shake -- the Bosnia flap and Bill Clinton's penchant for roaming off script.

It's given the chattering class the opportunity to question anew Obama's compassion for and understanding of the white working class.

It's especially loaded when coupled with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright brouhaha.

And it could halt dead Obama's surge in PA, a contest that Clinton must win by double digits to have a shot at the nom.

Redstate sums it up:

Small town Midwesterners believe in God, the 2nd Amendment and border security because they don't have jobs.

Just One Minute:

HALP US BROK O'BOMBA-- WE R STUCK HEAR N ALTOONA

Ha!

As I've said before, what Hillary Clinton really needed was something to kill Obama's perception of electability. And that is another huge reason why this is a big deal. She now has something solid to point to when explaining why Obama can't win Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, any state in the south, the mountain west, etc.

ATTN: John Mellencamp please call the white courtesy phone, Hillary Clinton would really, really like to talk to you.