Bitter?

You go into 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. And it's not surprising then 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.

Obama's speech may have contained an un-felicitous turn of phrase, but as I read it I saw no "elititism" or "racism". (Although a Clinton supporter, I may not support all that she does or says!).

As a diarist at Daily Kos states:

Obama lists things that people use to explain their frustrations, not express them. I believe that Obama is remarking upon bitter people on the left and the right. In fact, this may be something of a pro-gun, pro-religious statement, basically saying that certain embittered liberals cling to guns as a way to explain their frustrations, while some embittered conservatives cling to xenophobia, while just about everyone can irrationally blame various religions.

And Robert Reich's take.

Over the last eight years (and really beginning back in the Reagan administration), wealth and capital and economic rights have been brazenly removed from the rest of us and transferred to an elite super-minority, the theft wrapped in a quilted cloak of growth and free enterprise and national security.

And if we dare to object, we are branded whiners or, worse, un-American.

Should we be bitter? HELL YA! Should we do something about in November? HELL YA!