All you mouth-breathing yokels. . .

. . .out there in the hinterlands ought to be painfully aware of how Barack Obama feels about you now. He certainly made no bones about it when he was speaking to the "Marin County hot-tubbers" in San Francisco, recently:

"And it's not surprising then [you] get bitter, [you] cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like [you] or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain [your] frustrations."

Anyone remember my post a while back that said Obama's undoing will be his arrogance and duplicity? Well, there it is on full display.

Last night, he tried a do-over in Terre Haute, but came up very short:



No amount of dissembling is going to undo the damage that Obama has done to himself with his condescending caricature of middle America as a repository of angry, bitter, reactionary xenophobes who reflexively seek refuge in God and guns when confronted with a world they're incapable of understanding. His attempt to repackage his original sentiment as an expression of solidarity simply fails to address the fact that its underlying premise was that middle America really doesn't get what it's all about; that it is a vast collection of Pavlovian dogs, conditioned to respond to change in a way that has no relation to reality.

His attempt to exploit anti-Washington sentiment as a means of minimizing the impact of his deeply elitist dismissal of middle American values is, at its core, a confirmation of the very premise he's seeking to evade. It's as if Obama were saying, "Oh, oh! They're lashing out again. Better wave a red flag and distract them. Blaming Washington politicians is always a crowd pleaser."