James Taranto, in the Wall Street Journal, explains that Obama’s expressed opinion of the misfortunes responsible for the politics, religion, and avocations of small-town Americans, in fact, demonstrates that it is actually his own urban elite which is hostile to real diversity and afflicted with a negative and paranoid view of persons not exactly like themselves.

Obama’s promise rests on a false premise: that it is within the power of the president to restore the Rust Belt’s luster. Every incumbent president in living memory has sought at least one additional term, and the Keystone State has for decades been a key electoral battleground, both large and closely contested. If presidents had the power to make Pennsylvania’s declining towns wealthy, don’t you think one of them would have done so by now?

In truth, the decline of industries is simply a fact of life, like old age, sickness and death. Yet just as new generations supersede the old, a free economy produces innovation that gives rise to new industries. And while some places have declined, the nationwide economy has grown impressively for most of the past quarter-century.

Now consider the issues to which Obama claims these Pennsylvanians “cling” instead of economic ones. One of them, trade, is in fact an economic issue. It’s odd that Obama would criticize Pennsylvanians for “antitrade sentiment,” given that pandering to such sentiment has been a central feature of his campaign. You voters are idiots, and I promise to give you what you want!

Obama’s reference to “antipathy toward people who aren’t like them”–which he notably did not repeat in Indiana–seems just a cheap shot, an appeal to his San Francisco audience’s antipathy toward people who aren’t like them. Or perhaps it is evidence that he was listening more attentively than he has admitted to the sermons of his “spiritual mentor” about the “U.S. of KKK A.” …

Underlying this criticism is a curious normative premise: that the nonaffluent ought to prioritize their material interests over moral and cultural concerns. “Workers of the world, unite!” meets “The Virtue of Selfishness.”

Unlike Ayn Rand, Feingold and Obama see selfishness as a virtue only for bitter-off cultural conservatives. The well-heeled San Francisco Democrats Obama addressed last week stand to pay much higher taxes if he is elected. Many of them no doubt back Obama because they like his liberal positions on subjects like guns, abortion and same-sex marriage. If you think Obama criticized their priorities, we’ve got some change you can believe in. In Barack Obama’s America, rich people who vote on cultural issues rather than economic self-interest are principled and self-sacrificing. People of more modest means who do so are credulous and bitter.

When Feingold and Obama refer dismissively to cultural and moral issues, it is not because they do not take those issues seriously. It is because they would rather not take seriously the arguments on the other side. It is much less intellectually demanding, as well as flattering to oneself and those San Francisco Democrats, to caricature opposing positions as the products of poverty, ignorance and bitterness.

And Pat Buchanan, in Human Events, links Obama’s “bitter Pennsylvania small-towners” remarks to earlier statements, demonstrating that the sympathy Obama expressed in his famous Philadelphia speech to both sides separated by the racial divide is far from evenhanded.

It was said behind closed doors to the chablis-and-brie set of San Francisco, in response to a question as to why he was not doing better in that benighted and barbarous land they call Pennsylvania.

Like Dr. Schweitzer, home from Africa to address the Royal Society on the customs of the upper Zambezi, Barack described Pennsylvanians in their native habitats of Atloona, Alquippa, Johnstown and McKeesport. …

A few months back, Michelle Obama revealed her mindset about America with the remark that, “for the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country.” Barack has now revealed how he, too, sees the country. The Great Unifier divides the nation into us and them.

The “us” are the privileged cosmopolitan elite of San Francisco and his Ivy League upbringing. The “them” are the folks in the small towns and rural areas of that other America. Toward these folks, Obama’s attitude is not one of hostility, but of paternalism. Because time has passed them by, Barack believes, they cannot, in their frustration and bitterness, be held fully accountable for their atavistic beliefs and behavior.

Though neither mocking nor malicious, Barack’s remarks are, nonetheless, steeped in condescension. Inherent in his words is that these folks in Middle Pennsylvania are in need of empathy, education, assistance and perhaps therapy. …

Note, from that Philadelphia address, the highlighted words.

“Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race … as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything. … They … feel their dreams slipping away … opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense.

“Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.”

In Barack’s mind, black anger and resentment at “racial injustice and inequality” are “legitimate.” But the anger and resentment of white folks, about affirmative action, crime and forced busing are born of misperceptions — and of “bogus claims of racism” manipulated and exploited by conservative columnists and commentators to keep the racial pot boiling and retain power, so the right can continue to do the bidding of the corporations that are the real enemy.

Barack has stumbled into the eternal failing of the left-wing populist. He cannot concede that the anger of white America — that its right to equal justice has been sacrificed to salve the consciences of guilt-besotted liberals — is a legitimate anger.

Tim Blair quoting Dave S.:

Well, I do go a-churchin’ every Sunday with a bunch of bitter folks who complain about how the government is evil and screws them over, and we yell an’ whoop it up when the preacher rails against them Italians and Jews, an’ then we …

Oops, wait a minute, that’s not me, that’s Barack Obama.

In his famous Philadelphia speech on Race, Barack Obama justified the inflammatory statements of his pastor, friend, and former campaign advisor, the man he selected to marry him and to baptize his children, the Reverend Mr. Jeremiah “God damn America” Wright by quoting William Faulkner’s famous statement that “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past,” pointing to “segregated schools,” “legalized discrimination,” and “a lack of economic opportunity (for) black men” as the historical basis for Wright’s vicious hatred and malicious lies.

(Segregated schools, legalized discrimination, and lack of economic opportunity were) the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted.

But, as Ronald Kessler points out, there is no truth in such a picture of Jeremiah Wright’s early life at all. Jeremiah Wright never experienced segregated schools. In fact, Wright attended the ultra-elite Central High School, essentially Philadelphia’s equivalent of New York’s Stuyvesant High School, a college preparatory magnet school, the second oldest public secondary school in the United States, and the only high school in the country authorized to grant academic degrees.

In his speech on race, Barack Obama tried to explain away his longtime minister’s denunciations of America by saying that for blacks of his generation, memories of “humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away.”

But an examination… of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.’s background reveals that Obama’s characterization of his upbringing is mythology.

Described by Obama as his sounding board and mentor for more than two decades, Wright was born in Philadelphia in 1941. He lived in a racially mixed section called Germantown, which consisted of homes on broad tree-lined streets in northwest Philadelphia. The owners then were middle-class families.

For 62 years, Wright’s father, the Rev. Jeremiah Alvesta Wright, was pastor at Grace Baptist Church of Germantown. He was one of the first blacks to receive a degree from the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.

Wright’s mother, Mary Elizabeth Henderson Wright, was a schoolteacher. She was the first black to teach an academic subject at Roosevelt Junior High, the first to teach at Germantown High, and the first to teach at the Philadelphia High School for Girls. She became vice principal of Girls High in 1968.

Rather than attend the more racially mixed Germantown High School at 40 East High St., Wright traveled a few miles to the elite Central High School at 1700 West Olney Ave., graduating in 1959. Opened in 1838, Central High has a distinguished past and admits only highly-qualified applicants who are privileged to attend from all over the city. It is comparable to the Bronx High School of Science and Boston Latin School, both public schools known for academic excellence.

When Wright attended Central High, the student body was 90 percent white, according to students who attended around the same time. At least three-quarters of the students were Jewish. Former students of the period say racial tension did not exist.

Bill Cosby, who attended the school until transferring to Germantown High, has referred to Central as a “wonderful” school. In contrast to Wright, Cosby has denounced blacks who take refuge in self-pitying victimhood and seek to blame whites for problems in the black community.

“Central High was a marvelous academic environment,” says Tod Mammuth, who graduated in 1965 and is now a Philadelphia-area lawyer. “You had to have high academic credentials to be accepted and a high IQ score. Many later said it was more rigorous than college. We had no racial friction.”

There was no legally-enforced discrimination in 1950s Philadelphia. Nor was Jeremiah Wright embittered as a young man. He attended Virginia Union University in Richmond, but was sufficiently patriotic in 1961 that he dropped out of college, apparently inspired by a speech by John F. Kennedy, to join the US Marine Corps. He subsequently became a Navy Corpsman, and trained as a cardiopulmonary technician at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. Wright served on the medical team which cared for President Johnson, and received three letters of commendation.

The radical “God damn America” Mr. Wright is not a product of 1950s segregation, but is clearly instead the result of Wright finishing his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Howard University in the late 1960s, where he undoubtedly found a lifetime supply of leftwing politics and racial grievances.

“Lack of economic opportunity?”

Jeremiah Wright could have earned a very respectable middle-class income as a cardiopulmonary technician, but instead he finished college, acquired a master’s degree in English, then a second master’s in Divinity, and finally a doctorate in Divinity. In addition to being pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ, Wright has been a professor at two theological seminaries. He has served on the Board of Trustees of Virginia Union University, Chicago Theological Seminary and City Colleges of Chicago. He has also served on the Board of Directors of Evangelical Health Systems, and on numerous boards and committees of other religious and civic organizations. Wright has received a Rockefeller Fellowship and seven honorary doctorates.

He can expect a comfortable retirement. Ronald Kessler observes:

In retirement, Wright will continue a life of privilege that dates back to Central High. As a retirement gift, Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ is building him a million-dollar home abutting Odyssey Country Club and Golf Course in the nearly all-white Chicago suburb of Tinley Park. The home sits on land the pastor purchased in 2004 for $345,000. In December 2006, Wright sold the land to his church, which took out a $1.6 million mortgage on the property. In April 2007, the church applied for a building permit for the brick and stone structure.

Wright’s new home has 10,340 square feet of space, about four times the size of a typical suburban house. It includes four bedrooms, an elevator, an exercise room, and a four-car garage.

The SF Chronicle describes how Obama’s famous “bitter” condescending remarks were captured by an enterprising (Vassar ’68) Huffington Post blogger.

Presidential candidate Barack Obama’s campaign has been in full damage control mode since the senator’s blunt remarks about the nature of small town Pennsylvania voters were secretly recorded by a Huffington Post blogger at a recent San Francisco fundraiser that was supposed to be off limits to the press.

Obama, asked last Sunday why it was so hard for him to reach blue-collar voters, said that many had been overlooked economically and that “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.”

Democratic rival Hillary Rodham Clinton pounced on the comment over the weekend, calling it “elitist and divisive.”

An Obama campaign insider tells us the blogger, Mayhill Fowler, had tried to get into one of two Obama fundraising events in the Bay Area a couple of months back where former New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley stood in as a proxy.

She was turned away, even though she had offered to pay, says our source.

“There’s a very basic (fundraiser) rule – you don’t let press in, and anyone with an interest in reporting shouldn’t get in,” said the source.

Just how the MP3 – wielding Fowler managed to secure an invite to the $1,000 a head fundraiser at the San Francisco home of developer Alex Mehran wasn’t immediately clear – but Obama campaign higher-ups were said to be livid, with fingers pointing at a local fundraising consultant for the slip-up.

There should be a special award for bloggers like Charles Johnson (who debunked the Dan Rather forged National Guard letter in 2004), and Mayhill Fowler, who this year exposed the views about the common people that Barack Obama shared with a wealthy audience at a private fund-raiser held atop San Francisco’s Pacific Heights, whose reporting of the truth makes a significant impact on the course of Presidential Election contest.

Here’s an AP video of Hillary (trying to cinch that PA primary) knocking back a shot with a glass of beer in her other hand:

0:58 video

Bird Dog, at Maggie’s Farm, identifies the crucial subtext which has echoed around the entire country.

The reason Obama’s words keep getting so much attention is because they reveal so much of what we already know about how the self-ordained elite think about regular folks. …

Obama gets in trouble whenever he says what he thinks – and either he or his wife do it all the time. They don’t hide it.

Do they think we all live in Berkeley or Cambridge among the bien pensant brie-eaters? (disclaimer: I am known to eat brie.) Hillary is too “smart” and too lacking in conscience to make these sorts of errors of honesty.

I think the story is that Obama’s words have some legs because they expose the old story of the Left’s condescension towards, and sense of superiority in relation to, regular folks. Rush has always contended that the Left refuses to run on their real beliefs, and I think that is true. Truth is, the hard working folks of America are doing fine as long as they live within their means. They have many concerns and interests beyond their bank accounts and whatever freebies they could be entitled to.

And Americans are not babies: they neither long for a government mommy nor do they take politicans’ promises or pandering seriously. They are used to government taking their earnings and offering little in return. Mostly, they want the nanny government to leave them the heck alone. They are, in fact, thinking, responsible, hard-working adults. I know lots of “them,” including myself.

As Mark Levin always says (approx.), “If things are as terrible and hopeless in America as Hillary and Obama say they are, then how come every ambitious and freedom-seeking person in the world wants to come here to pursue their dreams?”

Obama’s political problem is that he is not enough of an impostor to fool the savvy American middle class.

Scrappleface reports on Hillary’s latest populist gesture:

Hillary Totes Bible to Gun Range

(2008-04-13) — Sensing an opportunity to portray Sen. Barack Obama as elitist and out of touch after his remarks about “bitter” rural Americans who cling to guns, God and xenophobia, Sen. Hillary Clinton stopped after church today at an indoor gun range, where she fired roughly 300 rounds through a handgun she said she carries concealed everywhere she goes.

Her lower lip bulging from a dip of Skoal, Sen. Clinton put her Bible in her handbag, and drew out her own Para Ordnance Warthog .45 caliber pistol.

As reporters looked on, the Democrat presidential candidate emptied one 10-round magazine after another, with fair accuracy, at a human silhouette target.

“Small town folk like us,” said Sen. Clinton, “don’t cling to God or guns because we’re bitter about the economy, as my opponent suggests. We believe in God because he’s real, and we keep and bear arms as the best insurance against tyrants who would strip our freedoms if they didn’t fear our collective power.”

Read the whole thing.

Obama’s San Francisco remarks, attributing the Keystone state’s small town residents’ religious faith and enthusiasm for hunting to bitterness over economic failure, are not winning him a lot of friends in Pennsylvania.

Scranton mayor Chris Doherty responded with an impromptu press conference in Lackawanna County’s Courthouse Square, accompanied by his predecessor in office, local union officials, the mayors of four nearby boroughs, and a visiting New Hampshire state senator, denouncing Obama’s contemptuous analysis.

(Scranton) Times-Tribune:

Former Scranton Mayor Jim Connors said the remarks demean people here as hicks. Mr. Obama wants to transcend stereotypes, but then he stereotyped others, Mr. Connors said.

Standing in front of the John Mitchell statue, Mr. Doherty called hunting a tradition, borne not out of spite but culture and pride. The area’s churches, he said, were built on hopes of improving life and fostering families, not because the population here is downtrodden.

Mr. Doherty pointed to economic growth and investment. He said it’s necessary to combat that negative image.

“That’s not the truth,” he said.

At Mr. Doherty’s side were Mr. Connors and the mayors from Jessup, Taylor, Freeland and Moosic, along with New Hampshire state Sen. Lou D’Allesandro.

Taylor Mayor Richard Bowen said Mr. Obama’s comments hit home beyond Pennsylvania, and he predicts it will cost the senator voters who are on the fence.

Mr. Connors said what most offends him is that Mr. Obama said these things on the other side of the country behind closed doors. Mr. Connors bet Mr. Obama wouldn’t have made such remarks in Altoona.

6:03 video

AP reports that Obama tried apologizing in Winston-Salem:

Obama tried to quell the furor Saturday, explaining his remarks while also conceding he had chosen his words poorly.

“If I worded things in a way that made people offended, I deeply regret that,” Obama said in an interview with the Winston-Salem (N.C.) Journal.

Those condescending San Francisco remarks were a major misstep. They are going to assure a Clinton victory in Pennsylvania.

I happened to be speaking to a Pennsylvania hunter from Berks County on the telephone yesterday. “Who would ever have imagined,” she marveled, “that Hillary Clinton would become the working man’s candidate in this state? But that’s the way it is. Only rich people and the college professors are for Obama.”

Meanwhile in Indiana, that redneck Hillary, proudly notes her own Scrantonian roots, brandishes her deer rifle, and fondly remembers granddad heading off to work at the mill (just before he gave her a childhood shooting lesson behind the fishing cabin he built with his own hands!). 2:55 video

Back in the more familiar environs of San Francisco after campaigning in small-town Pennsylvania, a still-shuddering Barack Obama explained the economic basis for the red state malaise of religion, gun ownership, xenophobia, and Republican-voting.

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.

Just a soupçon of federal job-training and economic aid, you see, and all those rednecks will turn in their deer rifles, subscribe to the New Yorker, and suddenly become sensitive to the urgent need for diversity down at the Polish-American Fire House.

Rand Simberg reports directly from “the Alabama of the North.”

I asked around the area, to see how his obvious compassion for Pennsylvanians was viewed. This is just one story, from one man in West Deer Township, but I’m sure that it’s typical.

“By cracky, it’s like the man sees into my soul!

“Thirty years ago, I had a good job in the mill in Pittsburgh. I was bringing in a good income, going to jazz clubs, discussing Proust over white wine and brie, with my gay friends of all colors. I was all for free trade, so that we could sell the steel overseas, and I never bothered to go to church, let alone actually believe in God.

“But then, the plant closed down, and I couldn’t get another job. I went on unemployment, and found odd jobs here and there, but they barely paid the rent in the loft, and the payment on the Bimmer. I couldn’t afford the wine and brie any more, and had to shift over to beer and brats.

“Of course, as a result, I started hanging out with the wrong crowd–the beer drinkers.

“And it wasn’t just the beer. Some of them actually went out in the woods in the fall, and shot animals. And kilt ’em. With real guns!

“I was shocked, of course. For all their diversity, none of my gay friends would have ever thought of doing anything like that. But with my job loss, and lack of money for pedicures and pommade, they didn’t want to hang with me any more. So I borried a twelve gauge over’n’under, and went out with my new beer-drinking animal-killing friends in the woods. And I’ll tell you what, when I shot down that eight-pointer, I felt a sense of power over the helpless in a way that I hadn’t since I’d been looking down on the rednecks when I had that good job in Pittsburgh, driving around town in my 528i.

“But somehow the killing, and hating those two-timing nancy boys wasn’t enough. I was still in despair. I started to search for answers, and I thought that I found them in Jesus. It started small, just church on Sunday, with prayers and a lecture from the preacher.

“But it didn’t stop there. Soon I was attending Wednesday night revivals, and huzzahing and hossanahing, and babbling with the best of them. After a few months I’d graduated to juggling garter snakes, then rattlers.

“But it wasn’t enough. Despite all the gun caressing, and animal killing, and hatred of people who weren’t like me, and anger at the Colombians who were…doing something to me–I’m not entirely sure what, and the tongue speaking and snake handling, I still couldn’t find a job.

“My social life continued to deteriorate. Not only was I no longer interested in those sensitive swishes, or literature, but I was starting to look with lust at my sister. And not just look, I’ll tell you what. She’d been out of work, too, and was getting mighty interested, if you know what I mean.

“I have hit rock bottom.

“Please, help me, O Bama. Forgive me, O Bama. O Bama, my Bama, rescue me from this living hell in which Reagan, and Bush, and Clinton, and Bush, have consigned me. Restore unto me my loft and my teutonic status symbol. Give me back my poofter friends, and my pinot grigio and my baked gruyere, and lattes. Save me from the killing and the beer, and most of all, from Jesus. Save me, O my Bama, and I will commit my vote unto you.

This is just one story of the many lives that Barack Obama has touched, and blessed, this day in the benighted Keystone State. But with his obvious compassion, and ability to feel the pain of others so unlike him, he is sure to carry the state in a couple weeks.

Ace summarizes Obama’s campaign message to small-town residents of the Keystone State:

Obama To Rural Pennsylvanians: Vote For Me, You Corncob-Smokin’, Banjo-Strokin’ Chicken-Chokin’ Cousin-Pokin’ Inbred Hillbilly Racist Morons

And compiles reactions:

Of course Obama is wrong. Rural Pennsylvanians loved their guns, hated foreigners and minorities and used religion as a front for their hatred loooong before the mills closed.

This 9:53 video quotes Barack Hussein Obama reading the audio book version of his autobiography, Dreams From My Father, and his pastor the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, on racial attitudes, providing an interesting comparison to the sentiments expressed in his more recent (presidential campaign period) Philadelphia speech.

Obama supporters will try to say that it’s just a partisan attack piece, but when his opponents have simply taken the words out of the candidate’s own mouth, they are not so easily dismissed.

Hat tip to Gateway Pundit.

Getty House, site of Obama fundraiser

Zombietime today has a photo essay of Barack Obama, champion of the downtrodden, visiting some typical supporters in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights.

Obama supporters arrive at fundraiser

The Republican National Committee contrasts General David H. Petraeus‘s testimony to Congress with the two democrat candidates’ campaign pledges to withdraw rapidly from Iraq.

2:28 video