Obama Stumbles on &#39Bitter&#39 Comment

Sen. Barack Obama’s “bitter” comment has severely wounded his campaign. While he might very well survive this episode and still go on to nab the Democratic presidential nomination, this flap gives the GOP huge new ammo for the fall campaign.

What these San Francisco comments about rural people do is to, again, paint a picture of a candidate who is an Ivy League snob, a left-wing elitist who thinks he is better than rural people. And this is an image that has bedeviled liberal Democrats for decades. Mike Dukakis, Walter Mondale, and John Kerry come to mind.

Doubts about Obama are already out there. Some people, 13 percent in a new national poll, suspect he is a Muslim. His middle name, Hussein, is also a negative among some voters. But a slew of other recent events paint a picture of a guy definitely out of the mainstream:

The Rev. Wright’s disgusting, white-hating, America-hating comments will be huge fodder in the fall election.

Obama’s refusal to disavow Wright’s racist rants have hurt him badly among the very voters he is now labeling as “bitter” and “clinging to guns . . . and religion.”

Michelle Obama’s chip-on-her-shoulder “I have never been proud of my country” statements also hurt his campaign and paint a disturbing picture of Team Obama. When a man’s wife and pastor, perhaps the two closest adults in his life, both attack the United States of America, that is telling about that man. If they had attacked the government and its policies that is OK. But both the Rev. Wright and Mrs. Obama actually attacked our country itself.

Paying repeated tribute in Chicago during his rise up the political ladder to one-time Weather Underground leader and domestic bomber William Ayers, a convicted felon and home-grown left-wing terrorist, is another example of Obama’s left-wing ideology, which he has so-far hidden with vague, ambiguous “Yes we can!” rhetoric.

He has refused to wear an American flag label pin.

He has refused to salute the American flag during the Pledge of Allegiance.

He supports giving driver's licenses to illegal immigrants.

Obama’s three attempts to apologize/clarify his San Francisco comments don’t solve the underlying problem.

What a shame that so many people, including some of these very “rural” people, have been snowed and fooled by Obama’s Change We can Believe In campaign. It is a campaign built on platitudes and generalities all meant to hide his extreme liberalism (twice he has had the most liberal voting record in the U.S. Senate; even more liberal than Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, who is the only Socialist in the Senate!).

Strictly from an analytical perspective, there is so much material here to paint Obama as someone not to be trusted as President and commander in chief.

John McCain cannot win by defending Bush’s pathetic record. It is indefensible. The war, the economy? No way! And his own pro-Iraq war record won’t help him.

So the only way he, or any GOP nominee, can win is to paint Obama as too big a risk to take for the most crucial job in the world.

Look for a totally negative campaign to be run — not by McCain’s campaign itself — but by the GOP and its associated entities who are in desperate shape and looking for something to turn things around. They see Obama as an inviting target and will exploit all of these items.

McCain will try to stay above the fray.

This is not to say that he doesn’t have his own baggage; he does. And his temper could blow at any moment — and if it ever blew in public as some of us have seen in private, then he would be viewed as un-electable. (Look for more on this troubling aspect of McCain’s personality within the next week.)

Two years ago, Sen. George Allen, a smiley and cocky senator seemingly headed for the White House, demeaned a young Virginian by calling him “macaca.” That effectively ended Allen’s political career.

Now we have another smiley and cocky senator, Barack Obama, demeaning rural white folks in a manner more revealing about Obama himself.

He has now entered "hate America" territory.

He will rue the day he uttered those elitist comments.