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On 4/6/08 at a fund raiser in the San Francisco area, Obama said this.

Obama’s comments
My response
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 “the jobs?” What exactly does that mean? It sounds like he is referring to factories that went out of business because they could not compete with factories in other parts of the U.S. or the world or because technology made them obsolete. That’s life in the modern world. Are small town Pennsylvanians so stupid that they just sit there unemployed for 25 years without finding another line of work or moving to a place with more opportunities? I was born and raised in the New Jersey suburbs of Philadelphia and in a rural town in Delaware, both near Pennsylvania. A lot of my relatives and acquaintances are Pennsylvanians. They seem the same as people in the rest of the country to me. I never thought of Pennsylvanians as different. Southerners? Yes. But not Pennsylvanians.
and nothing's replaced them. So do something else. Move somewhere else. Are you guys as profoundly dumb as Obama is saying?
And they fell through the Clinton Administration Yeah, Barack, we know you’re running against Hillary Clinton and have to find something to bad mouth about her or her husband every 100 words.
and the Bush Administration That would be the administration of George Bush whom you wish you were running against so you pretend you are as often as possible.
and each successive Administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate Just like you have in Ohio and Pennsylvania
and they have not. Just as you are not not going to regenerate those communities if you become president.
And it's not surprising then they get bitter He was asked why they were not supporting him. Maybe because he sucks. He’s too left wing. Too anti-American. Too inexperienced. Etc. But he is saying that anyone who is against him has a psychiatric problem. They are bitter. They oppose him and support Hillary Clinton because they are bitter about how the Clintons treated them. Well, gee, Obama. That makes perfect sense.
they cling to guns More explanation of why they are not supporting him. They have reacted to losing their jobs by “clinging” to their guns—like a child clinging to his teddy bear? Has Obama only been visiting moron asylums in Pennsylvania? Or NRA chapter presidents?
or religion I instantly reacted to this comment the way many other pundits have: It is almost an exact replica of Communism founder Karl Marx’s statement that religion is the opiate of the masses. Wikipedia details it this way:

It was translated from the German original, "Die Religion ... ist das Opium des Volkes" and is often referred to as "religion is the opiate of the masses." The quote originates from the introduction of his 1843 work Contribution to Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right which was subsequently released one year later in Marx's own journal Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, a collaboration with Arnold Ruge.

Marx was famously an atheist as were his most prominent followers Lenin and Stalin and their Soviet government. I believe Obama, as well as McCain and Hillary, are all atheists. None showed any interest in religion before they decided to go into politics. Obama’s “clinging to religion” comment is certainly an atheist perspective. All three presidential candidates are sociopaths (no conscience about using others to satisfy their own needs or desires) which is hardly a Christian behavior pattern.

The standard pundit line on the professed religiousness of politicians is to “take them at their word.” You gotta be kidding me! As David Geffen said, “Everybody in politics lies.” The media certainly do not take politicians at their word on any other subject. Basically, religion, like race, is simply taboo.

The press should investigate the religiousness of prominent politicians who make their religiousness a prominent part of their argument for being elected—like Obama—the way insurance company investigators check up on those receiving disability payments. Truly disabled people, like truly religious people, do some things and refrain from doing other things. Religiousness also is revealed by what people say and refrain from saying. For one thing, truly religious people do not accuse other religious people of “clinging to” religion solely out of frustration with long-term unemployment. In San Francisco, closet atheist Obama thought he was in a private meeting with his fellow atheists. That’s why he revealed his own true beliefs.

Finally, what does Obama really know of rural white Pennsylvanians? I expect almost nothing. So who is he really talking about when he says religious people make that decision out of desperation? The middle class rural Pennsylvania whites? Or the ghetto-dwelling congregation at Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s church? It sounds to me that it’s more likely he was describing the impoverished, church-going blacks on the South Side of Chicago when he spoke of desperate people who cling to religion.
or antipathy to people who aren't like them Aha! He is saying that those who do not support him are non-black racist bigots. Certainly they could not have any good reason like not liking his experience, positions, or character.
or anti-immigrant sentiment And they hate his late Kenyan father, too. If you are a Pennsylvanian who does not support Obama, you must be a member of the Klan as well as the Know Nothings.
or anti-trade sentiment Wait a minute! Rural Pennsylvanians do not support Obama because they are anti-[foreign] trade and he is pro-trade? Gee, didn’t he just swear on a stack of Bibles in Ohio that he hated NAFTA? (while having one of his people secretly assure Canada that it was just a standard campaign lie)
as a way to explain their frustrations. Typical politician dishonest trick. He was asked why he was having trouble getting rural Pennsylvanians to vote for him. But in his answer he twists it suggesting that he was asked why rural white Pennsylvanians were frustrated. The question was why Obama has been frustrated in his efforts to get their votes, not why Pennsylvanians were frustrated. There was no premise in the question that anyone thought Pennsylvanians were frustrated.

Obama’s response to his private San Francisco comments being made public should give pause to the many who rave about how smart he is. He has said—unconvincingly—that he was misinterpreted. He said he only said what everyone knows is true—which pretty much is the opposite of the “I was misinterpreted” argument and makes the situation worse for him if anything. He tried to shrug it off as just another political game played by his opponents and the media. He has said “Shame on Hillary” for bringing it up and mocked her relationship to guns. In short, his response to being outted was ham fisted, dumb, an attempt to bluff his way through it, and transparently dishonest.

This incident is part of mounting evidence that Obama is some sort of caricature of a black power leftist. We have his wife’s statements, Jeremiah Wright’s on-going statements, the welcome given by Obama’s black supporters to Wright during his “victory tour,” the defiant statements of his Weatherman terrorist friend and associate Bill Ayers, his refusal to wear an American flag pin or put his hand over his heart for the national anthem/pledge of allegiance.

He looks like an extreme white America hater who is trying to infiltrate the Oval Office disguised as a color-blind mainstream American.

I remind readers that there are plenty of black Americans who have no such baggage: Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, Vernon Jordan, Maya Angelou, all sorts of mainstream black columnists and talk show hosts and political leaders, various black journalists like Juan Williams. There is no reason to believe that Barack Obama is America’s last great black hope to be elected president. Colin Powell might have won had he run when people were urging him to a decade ago. We do not have to settle for this amazingly inexperienced, more and more apparent extremist to elect a black president.

Is Obama elitist?
As a result of the above comments, Obama has been accused of being elitist. A reporter said that a search for “Snobama” (Snob + Obama) on Google got 4,000 hits after the guns/religion remarks.

He denies it. He cites his late mother’s eligibility for food stamps as proof that he is not now a snob or elitist. He claims he was raised by a single mother.

My mom was eligible for food stamps, but she never got them because she said she would be embarrassed to use them. But I have still been accused, arguably correctly, as being an elitist.

The poverty of one’s mom decades ago does not preclude being elitist now. Indeed, the poverty of one’s mom decades ago is irrelevant to whether a person is an elitist or snob, which I have also been accused of.

Why am I willing to admit being an elitist? I went to elite West Point, elite army Ranger School, joined the elite 82nd Airborne Division, and volunteered for the elite green berets (Special Forces) before graduating from elite Harvard Business School. I am also honest and not a politician, two characteristics Obama has never had to contend with.

Raised by a single mom—but only for one year
Obama’s claims that he was raised by a single mother are more false than true. His mother was married on 2/2/61—six months before he was born and continuing until he was about two when his father abandoned him and his mother. The divorce took place in 1965 when Obama was four. When Obama was five years old, she married an Indonesian guy. So she was a single mother for one year when he was around five years old. From then on he was raised by his remarried mother and then by his married grandparents. I have seen no evidence that his grandparents were impoverished.

Arugula?
Last July, Obama had another elitist moment. He was trying to show sympathy for farmers in Iowa and said,

Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula?

First, Whole Foods is a store for elitist, natural, organic hippies—the sort of people mocked by the Larry Groce song Junk Food Junkie. For Chrissakes, Obama smokes cigarettes. How concerned can he be about eating healthy foods? Maybe he gets his tobacco products at Whole Nicotine.

And what the hell is arugula? It ain’t poke salad. It ain’t collard greens—a vegetable that was apparently talked about at a session of “How to be Black” that Obama missed. Suffice it to say it is not one of the vegetables your mom told you to eat when you were a kid. It is an elitist, natural, organic, hippy vegetable, the kind of thing you would expect them to sell at Whole Foods. The kind of thing you would expect them to serve in restaurants around Cambridge, MA, home of Harvard Law School, the alma mater of Obama and his wife.

In short, having a food stamp mom did not prevent Obama from becoming a nouveau elitist. Indeed, as with his nouveau noir blackness, his nouveau elitism proves the old saying,

Recent converts are the most zealous.

Obama is not a black elitist. He is a BLACK ELITIST. He has worked hard at becoming both black and elite—which is a difficult trick because the two groups are generally considered to be mutually exclusive, not to mention additional difficulties caused by his white mother, Indonesian step-father, and being raised by his white mom and white grandparents. Basically, he is having trouble keeping his story straight as a result of being a more or less white guy trying to pretend to be black and a middle class child trying to keep up with the rich Joneses at Punahou, Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard, then trying to seem middle class again after he has been making millions of dollars per year. Sir Walter Scott anticipated Obama when he said,

Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive.

Elite education
Certainly his undergraduate alma mater, Ivy League, Manhattan-located, Columbia University—also the alma mater of my son Dan (’03)—has been described as an elite school zillions of times by thousands of different people. And his other alma mater, and the one he shares with his wife—Harvard Law School—has been described as elite even more times by even more people. (My wife and I are Harvard MBAs.) His high school alma mater, The Punahou School, has also been described as elite thousands of times by thousands of people. In fact, Obama has never been in any kind of school other than elite since he attended public elementary school in Indonesia. (His first two years of college were at Occidental which ranks 36th among liberal arts colleges in U.S. News & World Report’s rankings.)

Even the geographic locations of his schools are elite, respectively: Honolulu, Hawai’i; Pasadena, California; Manhattan, New York; and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Obama did not get drafted into any of these schools. He eagerly sought admission to each, apparently playing his race card for all it was worth to gain admission and a diploma. Why? He wanted to be elite. Apparently, he missed the session of “How to pretend you are middle class so you can get middle class people to vote for you” lecture at the Harvard Law School Future Politicians of America club meeting. (It covered stuff like shopping at 99¢ stores, how to drink a shot in a beer, preparation of macaroni and cheese, use of Hamburger Helper in the kitchen, how to choose a suit at Sears, where to get red cellophane to cover your broken tail light, and so on.)