During the campaign, Obama was at a small, intimate gathering in San Fransisco, a supposedly friendly crowd, when he made his infamous "bitter clinger" remarks.
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.
See any similarity to the small, intimate, supposedly friendly gathering at last Friday's White House Ramadan dinner? Obama speaks his mind in front of what he takes to be a sympathetic crowd and then spends days walking it back, telling people that he didn't really mean what he said, or what it sounded like he said...or what he really meant. Or something...
I see a pattern.
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