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Supporters of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) sought to keep alive the controversy surrounding Sen. Barack Obama’s (Ill.) comments at a San Francisco fundraiser as her rival for the Democratic nomination acknowledged that his words were poorly chosen. Tom Vilsack, who served as mayor of a small town in Iowa before serving two terms as that state’s Democratic governor, called Obama’s comments “condescending” and “disappointing” during a conference call with reporters that also featured the mayors of five mid-sized Pennsylvania cities who are supporting Clinton’s candidacy. Vilsack, a co-chairman of Clinton’s presidential campaign, described rural Americans as “frustrated” and “anxious” over the economy but disputed Obama’s contention that they were bitter. Obama said at a private San Francisco fundraiser that Americans in small towns cling to “guns, religion or antipathy or to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustration,” according to a transcript published on Huffington Post, which was the first to report the comments. Obama was responding to a question about why his campaign was having difficulty in Pennsylvania. He described small town voters there as bitter about economic disparities and skeptical about politicians who promise change, which is Obama’s central campaign theme. In Indiana on Saturday, Obama said that he did not “say it as well as I should have,” but did not back away from his contention that voters are bitter. Obama’s camp also held a conference call Saturday featuring Pennsylvania mayors. Lancaster Mayor Richard Gray said that he would use the word angry rather than bitter to describe small town moods. He also disagreed with Obama’s original statement which implied that rural Americans clung to their religion or their guns as a crutch. Clinton and her supporters homed in on that portion of the remarks in speeches and news events today, hoping for an opening that might allow the former first lady to close the gap to Obama. Gray also said he believed Obama offered the chance to shift the focus to more pressing matters, and would more ably represent the needs of small town American than would Sen. Clinton. Gray called the responses to the remarks put forth by Clinton and Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, as more condescending than Obama’s original words were. Braddock, Pa., Mayor John Fetterman said Obama’s remarks weren’t on the order of “fabricating sniper stories” or “imagining opposition to NAFTA,” a shot at Clinton. Asked to defend Obama’s comments, David Axelrod, the campaign’s chief strategist, said that Obama was trying to say that small town voters hold onto things that are important to them in difficult economic times, like their faith and their traditions. But Vilsack contended that Obama was implying that the faith of Americans who live in small towns is superficial. “That’s not what I know. What I know is that our faith is real and it is rooted,” Vilsack said. |
