I like BTD but I can't agree with his final statement.

"Not good. But Obama is a Media Darling and Bill Clinton screwed up today so Obama will get away with it mostly unscathed. That's why he is the better choice for Dem nominee."

NO. He's not the better choice for the Democratic nominee. The media hates anything Clinton and Obama's their pet now only because he's opposing Clinton. If Obama is the nominee; come GE time they'll toss him aside like a one-night stand and go back to their everlasting love for McCain.

It just won't make any difference who the Democratic nominee is when the gates open.

The fact is, Obama isn't ready for prime time, has no convictions except himself and if elected could be a catastrophe for the Democratic party.

Think of it this way: What would have happened if Al Smith had won the Democratic nomination in 1932 instead of Franklin Roosevelt.

His speeches are getting more and more predictable though.  Pretty soon someone will have a ObamaOratory program that will accept inputs[state, target demographic, significant issues] and crank out a speech for him.

So he manages to say "I am running for President specifically so I can save you and you and  you.".  It's a good line, but how often can he use it before someone says "Hey, the only Change we've seen in these parts is a change for the worse.  What will you do that is different than what everyone else did?".

Sometimes I don't know whether to despise the man or admire him for the way he's played the voters.

The farmers in my small town (pop 1,200) voted solidly for him, and I feel bad for them if they hear about these comments.  The church is the center of life in this town, everybody hunts and owns guns.  There's no anti-immigrant fervor of any kind here.  The Jamaican guys who come to pick our apple crop are greeted every year like returning family, and the Mexicans of dubious status who work on many of the farms are fiercely protected from questioning by immigration authorities.  Both are well paid and housed in good homes.  My overwhelmingly white town elected a gay man with two little adopted African-American daughters to the school committee, for crying out loud.

There are some angry, bitter, bigoted people in some small towns, I have no doubt, but I frankly saw much, much more of that poison in the "liberal" suburbs I used to live in than the small town that's now my home.

This just makes me crazy.  The Democratic Party is supposed to stick up for not just African-Americans but also all working people and farmers, not trash them in order to court favor with wealthy white suburbanites.

The folks here are low-information voters, but idealistic, and the shine in their eyes when they talk about voting for Obama is something to be proud of.  I haven't said a peep about my opinion of him because I can't bear to say a discouraging word about their idealism.

  It was too calculating by half, and all she complained about was that he said they are bitter.  WELL, SOME ARE!  Pollyanna words from her will not be helpful here.

  What the harmful (for him) words from Obama were had to do with his equating the smalltown's bitterness with the economy CAUSING them to "cling to religion" -- and then linking 'religion' as an item alongside guns as well as racial and cultural prejudice (attitudes toward people who are different or who are immigrating [illegally, I presume].

  And that he said these words, based on values of the current audience, at a mansion in San Francisco, to only the richest people in the area (or in the world) invited to attend.  Reporters weren't allowed.  I'm surprised that a tape was made and was released.  Here again is the setting for those words, with photographs, as mentioned here a couple of days ago.  The monied people wanted to know why he wasn't doing better with the less-monied folks in Pennsylvania and other big states.

"these are a bunch of ignorant folks who don't know what their real problems are and don't know I will make it all better."

No?  I didn't think so.

Listen, whether intentionally or not, this man is not a healer in any sense of the word.  He's the most divisive guy I've seen come along in the Dem. Party in many years.  He cannot "heal" the divisions in this country by trashing half of all Democratic voters, Dem. leadership who don't support him, folks who are pro-choice, folks who are low-income, folks who live in small towns all over America, his own hard-working grandma, for God's sake.

One of the reasons I support Hillary is that I see her as a tough politician who will use the Presidency to the best effect. I don't advocate her lying, but incessantly telling the truth is not always good politics, and I don't demand that of her.

I say most of the above  because I'm responding to your comment. I think it's important to add the other part of the equation: what Obama said isn't necessarily the truth. I'm an East Coast, latte drinking liberal. But I come from a working class background, and even though I've left things like church going behind me, I recognize that not evryone is like me. I know many sophisticated, intelligent people who go to church with their families every Sunday. If anything, I think some churchgoers might be a little defensive, knowing that the intelligentsia looks down on them and their simple beliefs.  Obama's statement makes it clear that he shares that disdainful attitude towards the simple folk in middle America.

Their desire to go hunting is so foreign to him, he can only think they are "clinging" to their guns out of fear and resentment. And by the way, this is reinforced by the fact that he delivered his little talk in front of a bunch of San Francisco liberals, in a setting that really made it sound like he was talking about "those people." If you asked the Clinton campaign what would be the most damaging place for Obama to make that kind of statement, they would have plunked him down right in the same spot, at a San Francisco fundraiser.

It was as obvious as could be that he had simply goofed, and he even tried to pretend at first that some of his statements just meant something different from what they clearly meant. When that didn't fly, somehow, those very gaffes got turned into a brand spanking new Obama foreign policy, as if he had intended all along to articulate this new approach.