"You the People"

There’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip. -- idiom

The wheels came off the Barack Obama spin machine last week and recovery has been slow.

Speaking at a San Francisco fund-raiser, Obama suggested that the Pennsylvania proletariat is bitter about its class struggle and has subsequently clung to the opiates of guns and religion in an effort to compensate for feelings they don’t understand.

Of course, I’m paraphrasing, but not by much. Here are his actual comments:

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 to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Since then, Obama has angrily denied accusations of elitism, at one point laying bare his elitism as he attempted to accuse Hillary Clinton of, you guessed it, elitism.

“Hillary Clinton is out there like she's on the duck blind every Sunday,” Obama said. “She's packing a six-shooter. Come on, she knows better.”

Of course she knows better. And so do most Pennsylvania hunters, who don’t go duck hunting with a revolver.

Despite his apology and his denials of elitism, Obama had this to say to the editorial boards of two Pennsylvania newspapers yesterday:

My syntax was poor, but as a wise older woman who was talking to me [recently] said, “You misspoke, but you didn’t lie.”

Although this is an obvious reference to Hillary’s lies about landing amid sniper-fire in Bosnia, it is also a reiteration of the original insult toward middle-class Pennsylvanians.

They say a drunken man’s words are a sober man’s thoughts, and although there is no evidence that Obama had hit the bottle when he made those comments in San Francisco last week, I wouldn’t be surprised one bit if it turns out he did indeed have a little too much of the creature.