Obama Campaign Taking Shots:Will it hurt his chances?

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.”As Mr. Obama concluded a three-day tour of Indiana, where the May 6 primary has emerged as a crucial stop in the Democratic presidential nominating fight, his remarks last week at a California fund-raiser threatened to complicate his efforts to broaden his appeal to working-class voters here and in Pennsylvania, which holds its primary April 22.
Asked at that fund-raiser why his candidacy was struggling in Pennsylvania, Mr. Obama responded that many voters were “bitter” about their economic inequalities.
“So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or antitrade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations,” Mr. Obama said, according to a transcript on the Huffington Post Web site, which first published the remarks on Friday.
For a second straight day, Mr. Obama sought to contain the political fallout surrounding the remark. At a rally Friday evening in Terre Haute, he angrily rebuked Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and John McCain of Arizona for what he said was an attempt to use social and cultural issues to distract voters from other concerns, but at his appearance here Saturday he softened his tone and conceded his remarks had not been artfully phrased.
“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.”
Mr. Obama urged voters to “get past the distractions of our politics” and vote their economic interests.
With the Pennsylvania primary only 10 days away, the comments touched off a fresh surge of criticism about Mr. Obama’s ability to win over working-class voters. It was a demographic that his campaign has aggressively courted since losing the Ohio primary to Mrs. Clinton last month.
In Indianapolis on Saturday, Mrs. Clinton told voters she was “taken aback by the demeaning remarks Senator Obama made about people in small-town America.”
“Senator Obama’s remarks are elitist and they are out of touch,” Mrs. Clinton told an audience. “They are not reflective of the values and beliefs of Americans. Certainly not the Americans that I know.”
The McCain campaign late Friday evening criticized Mr. Obama for failing to express regret for his remark.
Tucker Bounds, a spokesman for Mr. McCain, said, “Instead of apologizing to small-town Americans for dismissing their values, Barack Obama arrogantly tried to spin his way out of his outrageous San Francisco remarks.”
“You can’t be more out of touch than that,” he added.