Acting as if they were already squaring off against each other in the general election, John McCain and Barack Obama clashed over the Democrat’s use of “bitter” to describe discouraged American workers.
In dueling speeches to a convention of newspaper editors and publishers in Washington, McCain and Obama traded blows over Obama’s April 6 remarks about voters in economically distressed small towns.
“They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment,” Obama told wealthy donors at a private fundraiser in San Francisco.
The presumptive GOP nominee and the Democratic front-runner virtually ignored Hillary Clinton, who has been pounding Obama over his remarks in Pennsylvania.
Obama relegated Clinton to the status of a mere sparring partner who is “doing me a great favor because she’s been deploying most of the arguments that the Republican Party will be using against me in November. And so it’s toughening me up and I’m getting a run through the paces here.”
If Obama thought coming to Washington would win him some relief from Clinton’s criticism, he was in for a rude surprise.
“Those comments are elitist,” said McCain, who added that Obama “disparages people who are hard-working, honest, dedicated people who have cherished the Second Amendment and the right to hunt.”
For the third day in a row, Obama tried to control the damage from his gaffe.
“I regret some of the words I chose,” he told the newspaper convention several hours after McCain’s appearance. “But I will never walk away from the larger point that I was trying to make.”
“A lot of people in this country have become cynical about what government can do to improve their lives,” he said. “They are angry and frustrated with their leaders for not listening to them, for not fighting for them, for not always telling them the truth. And yes, they are bitter about that.”
McCain campaign manager Rick Davis cited the flap in a request for money he sent to Republicans on Monday.
“We are up against a large fundraising hurdle if Barack Obama is the nominee,” wrote Davis, who contrasted “Obama’s liberal, elitist philosophy and John McCain’s faith in the small town values.”
Obama acknowledged that “McCain and the Republicans in Washington are already looking ahead to the fall and have decided that they plan on using these comments to argue that I’m out of touch with what’s going on in the lives of working Americans. I don’t blame them.”
He added, “If John McCain wants to turn this election into a contest about which party is out of touch with the struggles and the hopes of working America, that’s a debate I’m happy to have.”
