Kyle Bell

Barack Obama faced yet another day of attacks from his opponents (Hillary and McCain), while the media pounced as well, with CNN mischaracterizing what he said:

MUNCIE, Indiana (CNN) — Sen. Barack Obama on Saturday tried to clarify what he meant when he said some small-town Pennsylvanians are “bitter” people who “cling to guns and religion.”

Talk about hacking a quote and misconstruing it to create a fake controversy for headlines. What Obama actually said was:

Here’s how it is: in a lot of these communities in big industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so long, and they feel so betrayed by government, and when they hear a pitch that is premised on not being cynical about government, then a part of them just doesn’t buy it. And when it’s delivered by — it’s true that when it’s delivered by a 46-year-old black man named Barack Obama (laugher), then that adds another layer of skepticism (laughter). [...]

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of 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. 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 anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Instead of being responsible journalists, CNN’s writers devoted an entire six words out of two paragraphs that he spoke. If you are going to write an article on a speech, at least give a decent portion and some context. You don’t take a word like “bitter”, attribute it to “small-town Pennsylvanians” and say they cling to guns. What he said was that many small towns are economically depressed. The jobs have gone overseas (or to Mexico), they haven’t come back despite promises from the Clintons and Bush’s. Many Americans ARE bitter about the disparity between rich and poor in this country. To say otherwise, like Hillary and McCain are, is to be an elitist. By the way, for Hillary to call Obama an elitist when she just released tax returns showing that she earned $110 million over six years… talk about irony.