4um: Obama on small-town PA: Clinging to religion, guns, xenophobia

Huffpo's Mayhill Fowler has more from Obama's remarks at a San Francisco fundraiser Sunday, and they include an attempt to explain the resentment in small-town Pennsylvania that won't be appreciated by some of the people whose votes Obama's seeking:

You go into 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.

And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations. That's a pretty broad list of things to explain with job loss.

We hill billy white trash of small town Pa. do own guns, always have, do go to Church always have, and we do dislike slicks from Chicago or any other large city that pass by with their arrogant mouth.

You bet, we now have blacks, all from the eastern cities, and every one of them are on welfare, living in taxpayer subsidized housing, not a one of them work.

Tell you what slick, up front, hundreds of us changed registration just to vote against you on April 22.

Up yours Barry Hussain.....sell that crap to the California freaks. I'll be here with my guns.

I just came back from a Ron Paul rally at PSU. I was pleasantly surprised at the number of kids (1500, give or take in the rain) and their desire for freedom from central government.

"McCain adviser Steve Schmidt called Obama’s statement “remarkable” and “extremely revealing.”

“It shows an elitism and condescension towards hardworking Americans that is nothing short of breathtaking,” Schmidt said. “It is hard to imagine someone running for president of the United States who is more out of touch with average Americans.”

Schmidt also said it shows Obama views the people he’s trying to relate to with “contempt.”

It's a slap to the gun culture, and given his previous statements on the 2nd, will hurt him. It's already leading the cable news shows.

He's saying that it is not surprising that there is a lot of distrust in a small community that has been through job losses, IMO.

While there are a cpl small towns here, that "may" fit his statement, the other 99% of Pa does not fit it.. Yes, we have Guns, Yes, we go to Church and Yes, we have lost Jobs, but we Don't Give Up and we sure don't Give In..

"It's not surprising then 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," he said.

"Robert A. Gleason Jr., chairman of the Republican Party of Pennsylvania called the remarks "incredibly insulting" and predicted that many in his state, where Mr. Obama has trailed Mrs. Clinton in surveys and polls poorly against Mr. McCain, would agree.

"In light of this most recent statement, I believe Americans are going to have even more questions about his values. Not only do these comments reveal a condescending elitism, Obama illustrates to us just how out of touch he is with middle-class America." Mr. Gleason said."

I'm not surprised that Barry slipped on a banana peel, after all haven't we spent the better part of last month documentation his various left-wing political positions? Even his admirers can't rationally argue that he isn't a gun grabber. What blows me away is that despite what we've uncovered, he is still their guy. Geraldine Ferraro is right; if he were white, he'd never be where he is today.

In reality it appears to be the white half that is speaking. Blacks that I know love their guns and go to church, and like Obummer, live in white neighborhoods.

So we have a far leftwing gun grabber that parades his ties to a church that thinks that is all a bad idea.

Who's Blogging

Barack Obama, who informs campaign audiences that he taught constitutional law for 10 years, might be expected to weigh in on the historic Second Amendment case before the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices are pondering whether the 1976 District of Columbia law effectively prohibiting personal gun ownership in the nation's capital is constitutional. But Obama has not stated his position.

Obama, disagreeing with the D.C. government and gun control advocates, declares that the Second Amendment's "right of the people to keep and bear arms" applies to individuals, not just the "well regulated militia" in the amendment. In the next breath, he asserts that this constitutional guarantee does not preclude local "common sense" restrictions on firearms. Does the draconian prohibition in Washington fit that description? My attempts to get an answer have proved unavailing. The front- running Democratic presidential candidate is doing the gun dance.

That is a dance that many Democrats do, as revealed in private conversation with party strategists. As urban liberals, they reject constitutional protection for gun owners. As campaign managers, they want to avoid the fate of the many Democratic candidates who have lost elections because of gun control advocacy. The party's House leadership last year pulled from the floor a bill for a congressional seat for the District to protect Democratic members from having to vote on a Republican amendment against the D.C. gun law.

Hillary Clinton has extolled the Second Amendment, though not to the degree Obama has. Campaigning at Iowa's Cornell College on Dec. 5, he asserted that the Second Amendment "is an individual right and not just a right of the militia." He has repeated that formulation along the primary trail, declaring at a Milwaukee news conference before the Feb. 19 Wisconsin primary: "I believe the Second Amendment means something. . . . There is an individual right to bear arms."

That would imply that the D.C. gun law is unconstitutional. Mayor Adrian Fenty's brief to the Supreme Court rests on the proposition that the Second Amendment "protects the possession and use of guns only in service of an organized militia." Consequently, I concluded in a March 13 column about the case that Obama had "weighed in against the D.C. law."

On March 24, a reader wrote in an e-mail to The Post that "Obama supports the D.C. law" and demanded a correction. That was based on an Associated Press account of Obama's Milwaukee news conference asserting that "he voiced support for the District of Columbia's ban on handguns." In fact, all he said was: "The notion that somehow local jurisdictions can't initiate gun safety laws to deal with gang-bangers and random shootings on the street isn't borne out by our Constitution."

That leaves Obama unrevealed on the D.C. law. In response to my inquiry about his specific position, Obama's campaign e-mailed me a one-paragraph answer: Obama believes that while the "Second Amendment creates an individual right, . . . he also believes that the Constitution permits federal, state and local government to adopt reasonable and common sense gun safety measures." Though the paragraph is titled "Obama on the D.C. Court case," that specific gun ban is never mentioned. I tried again last week, without success, to learn Obama's position before writing this column.

Obama's dance on gun rights is part of his evolution from the radical young Illinois state legislator he once was. He was recorded in a 1996 questionnaire as advocating a ban on the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns (a position he has since disavowed). He was on the board of the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation, which takes an aggressive gun control position, and in 2000 considered becoming its full-time president. In 2006, he voted with an 84 to 16 majority (and against Clinton) to prohibit confiscation of firearms during an emergency, but that is his only pro-gun vote in Springfield or Washington. The National Rifle Association grades his voting record (and Clinton's) an "F."

There is no anti-gun litmus test for Democrats. In 2006, Ted Strickland was elected governor of Ohio and Bob Casey U.S. senator from Pennsylvania with NRA grades of "A." Following their model, Obama talks about the rights of "Americans to protect their families." He has not yet stated whether that right should exist in Washington.

I'm sure Obama is somewhat conflicted on the issue having spent many years in an area where drive-by shootings abound.

Well, of course you understood my comment, but you persist in wasting bandwidth with inane sarcasm.