Barack Obama made some remarks last Sunday highlighting his frustrations with his failure to connect with the white middle American working class- that in turn made it even harder for him to connect with the white middle American working class.  Go figure.

At issue are comments Obama made privately at a fundraiser in San Francisco last Sunday. He explained his troubles winning over working class voters, saying they have become frustrated with economic conditions:

”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.”

The comments, posted on the Huffington Post political Web site Friday, set off a storm of criticism from Clinton, Republican nominee-in-waiting John McCain and other GOP officials. It threatened to highlight an Obama weakness — the image that the Harvard-trained lawyer is arrogant and aloof.

Of course the Obama camp went into damage control mode to attempt to defuse the flare-up, and put a little more context to his words.

”I didn’t say it as well as I should have,” he said at Ball State University.

There has been a small ”political flare-up because I said something that everybody knows is true, which is that there are a whole bunch of folks in small towns in Pennsylvania, in towns right here in Indiana, in my hometown in Illinois, who are bitter,” Obama said Saturday morning at a town hall-style meeting at the university. ”They are angry. They feel like they have been left behind. They feel like nobody is paying attention to what they’re going through.”

”So I said, well you know, when you’re bitter you turn to what you can count on. So people, they vote about guns, or they take comfort from their faith and their family and their community. And they get mad about illegal immigrants who are coming over to this country.”

After acknowledging his previous remarks in California could have been better phrased, he added:

”The truth is that these traditions that are passed on from generation to generation, those are important. That’s what sustains us. But what is absolutely true is that people don’t feel like they are being listened to.

”And so they pray and they count on each other and they count on their families. You know this in your own lives, and what we need is a government that is actually paying attention.

Of course, he still with these comments misses the fact that most of these people hold faith in these same principles and hold the same beliefs in these topics- even when the chips aren’t down.

Hillary Clinton never one to shy away from an opening to show how much she is part of whatever target audience she’s after at the time saw this as an opportunity not only to highlight her opponent’s weakness in this event, but also to show once again, how much she is “one of the people”.

”I was raised with Midwestern values and an unshakable faith in America and its policies,” she said. ”Now, Americans who believe in the Second Amendment believe it’s a matter of constitutional right. Americans who believe in God believe it’s a matter of personal faith.”

”I grew up in a churchgoing family …,” she continued. ”The people of faith I know don’t ‘cling’ to religion because they’re bitter. People embrace faith not because they are materially poor, but because they are spiritually rich …

”I also disagree with Senator Obama’s assertion that people in this country ‘cling to guns’ and have certain attitudes about immigration or trade simply out of frustration,” she said.

”People don’t need a president who looks down on them,” she said. ”They need a president who stands up for them.”

Of course, Clinton’s claims to mid-western normalcy ring about as true to some as her accounts of being fired upon while travelling to Bosnia (never happened, in case anyone forgot).  And with that in mind, Vice President Dick Cheney has stepped up to the podium and issued a challenge for Hillary to meet him out in the woods and have a “hunt-off”.

Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Vice President Dick Cheney said that a hunting contest between him and the New York senator was “the only way” to determine whether Sen. Clinton’s tales of her gun prowess were for real.

“To be frank, Hillary Clinton’s stories about her adventures with guns don’t exactly pass the smell test,” the vice president told host Tim Russert. “If she really wants to show that she knows how to handle a rifle, there’s an easy way to do that: meet me in the woods.”

While some in the Clinton campaign expressed concern about their candidate accepting Mr. Cheney’s challenge, the idea of a hunting contest got the ringing endorsement of one member of her inner circle, former president Bill Clinton.

“Dick Cheney and Hillary in the woods with guns?” President Clinton said at a campaign stop in Pittsburgh. “Boy, I like the sound of that.”

But shortly after the vice president issued his challenge, Sen. Clinton seemed to back off from her earlier claims of hunting experience, saying that she had “misspoke” about her hunting exploits as a child.

“I fired a gun once, but I didn’t like it, and I didn’t recoil,” she said.

This is probably a wise challenge for her to avoid, as anyone who recalls Cheney’s hunting prowess figures this is just an excuse for him to shoot her in the face.

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