Watching the consternation among the TV pundits on Barack Obama's "bitter" comments is getting downright hilarious. After days of near universal agreement that this was going to absolutely crush Obama, how more than one pundit said this was the "greatest present ever given to Hillary Clinton," it turns out that most people in small towns don't give a shit about the matter, and if anything, they kind of agree with Obama's sentiment, even though they understand he didn't say it right.
The Associated Press took the time to get out there and talk to some regular folk, and found that most people either didn't care, or agreed with his comments, while a couple took Senator Clinton's side. Nothing close to a death blow.
Of course, average folks in PA seemed to buck the media elites, in public, too. First, as covered here at Huffington Post, Hillary Clinton was heckled at the Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM) meeting on Monday morning, when she raised the comments, while Barack Obama got cheered. The meeting was attended by the working Joe and seemed they didn't mind the comments at all.
FOX News was the only outlet I saw to go out and ask people what they think. They found a couple people, in Allentown. Both of them seemed to pretty OK with what Barack Obama said (FOX read his original comments from San Fran, by the way).
Polling has shown that Obama hasn't been hurt by this either. The Gallup poll shows him increasing his lead, while both the Quinnipiac poll and the LA Times poll show him keeping it close in Pennsylvania. Both those polls were taken in the immediate aftermath of the comments, when the news was the absolute worst for Obama. The LA Times poll also shows, interestingly, that Obama took a lead in Indiana during that time.
Polling done of average people of all parties done by Media Curves shows that when voters were shown a video of Obama's response to attacks about the comments, they thought MORE positively of him. As in, the more Obama talks about it, the more people like him.
All of this smacks in the face of media elites who presume to know what small-town Americans think and feel. It has to be causing them heartburn, not because they go out there with an agenda to beat Obama or anything, but they're being proved horribly, horribly wrong, and they don't like it. And so, today, they warned that it's still too early to tell what people think and that eventually, Americans will prove them right. They shouldn't hold their breath.
Ironically, TV elites and pundits making broad-based assumptions about what working-class Pennsylvanians feel is the same exact thing they say Senator Obama did so wrong. And when small-town Americans don't back them up, rather than admit they might not know what they're talking about, they stubbornly refuse to admit maybe it is they who are truly out of touch.
That's something we should all be truly bitter about.