You have to give Obama credit: he acted quickly to try to defuse the anger over his condescending remarks towards rural voters in Pennsylvania. But he’s not going to be able to get past this as long as he refuses to apologize. Let’s look at what Obama said that got him into such hot water. Boil it down, and this is the key phrase:
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.
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