Obama calls remarks about 'bitter' small-town voters 'my biggest boneheaded move'

"Will gun-toting, churchgoing white guys pull the lever for Barack Obama?" So asks The New York Times in introducing Matt Bai's long story in today's Magazine. Bai begins by excerpting Obama's remarks to California donors about "bitter" small-town voters clinging to guns and religion and "antipathy toward people who aren't like them," and writes:

That comment . . . undercut one of the central premises of Obama’s campaign, an argument he first floated in his famous 2004 convention address — that he could somehow erode the tired distinctions between red states and blue ones and appeal to disaffected white men who had written off national Democrats as hopelessly elitist. Instead, in the weeks that followed, white working-class primary voters, not only in industrial states like Pennsylvania but also in rural states like Kentucky and West Virginia, rejected his candidacy by wide margins, and he staggered, wounded, toward the nomination.

“That was my biggest boneheaded move,” Obama told Bai in an interview for the story. Speaking of himself in the third person, he continued, “How it was interpreted in the press was Obama talking to a bunch of wine-sipping San Francisco liberals with an anthropological view toward white working-class voters. And I was actually making the reverse point, clumsily, which is that these voters have a right to be frustrated because they’ve been ignored. And because Democrats haven’t met them halfway on cultural issues, we’ve not been able to communicate to them effectively an economic agenda that would help broaden our coalition.” Obama added that he was also trying to argue to the Marin County crowd that "You guys need to stop thinking that issues like religion or guns are somehow wrong."

Despite polls showing John McCain with a double-digit lead among white men who haven't been to college, Obama is spending "far more time and money than either of the last two Democratic nominees on an effort to persuade working-class and rural white guys that he is not the elitist, alien figure they may be inclined to think he is," in order to build a broader governing coalition and leave behind the culture wars that began in the 1960s, Bai reports.

"Obama’s strategists accept that there will be some number of voters — particularly white men — who will reject Obama solely because he is black," Bai writes. "But they are betting, first, that most of these voters wouldn’t have voted for a Democrat in any event and, second, that the groundswell of black support for Obama will produce enough new African-American votes in a lot of states to offset them." (Read more)

UPDATE, Oct. 21: Rural Republicans continue to use Obama's April remarks against him. Click here to read Trey Pollard on PolitickerKY.com about Kentucky state Senate President David Williams on the campaign trail with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.