Fox News highlights Obama "Bittergate" comments from new memoir

Bradford Betz reports under the headline, "Obama says controversy over infamous ‘bitter’ comments about small-town Americans still ‘nags at me’":  

Former President Barack Obama says the controversy sparked by his infamous comments about white working-class voters being “bitter” and clinging “to guns or religion” still nags him because it misconstrued his genuine sympathy for the same people who perceived him to be out of touch.

Obama made the comments in a passage from his new book, “A Promised Land,” the first volume of his presidential memoirs, released Tuesday.

The former commander in chief addressed controversial comments he made on April 6, 2008, while on the campaign trail. During a fundraising event in San Francisco that evening, Obama was recorded making off-the-cuff remarks about white working-class voters in small towns.

Obama made the comments in a passage from his new book, “A Promised Land,” the first volume of his presidential memoirs, released Tuesday.

The former commander in chief addressed controversial comments he made on April 6, 2008, while on the campaign trail. During a fundraising event in San Francisco that evening, Obama was recorded making off-the-cuff remarks about white working-class voters in small towns.

* * * 

In his memoir, Obama said he wished he could take his comments back and offered an amended version: “It’s not surprising then that they get frustrated … and they look to the traditions and way of life that have been constants in their lives, whether it’s their faith, or hunting, or blue-collar work, or more traditional notions of family and community. And when Republicans tell them we Democrats despite these things — or when we give these folks reason to believe that we do — then the best policies in the world don’t matter to them.”

I wrote nearly a whole law review article about these comments, The Geography of the Class Culture Wars, published in 2011.