Via AP/Yahoo News:

MUNCIE, Ind. - Democrat Barack Obama on Saturday conceded that comments he made about bitter working class voters who “cling to guns or religion” were ill chosen, as he tried to stem a burst of complaints that he is condescending.

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

He provided clarification his political opponents can’t twist:

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.

None of his opponents will even touch that main point, that people are angry at the failures of government to deal with the good jobs that have been taken away and the lack of opportunity left behind for working families. They’ll continue to rip him because he pointed out how that anger results in lesser issues doiminating elections.

But they don’t want to talk about their support of NAFTA, McCain’s support of Bush’s massive tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy, the votes to launch a war that sent gas and food prices through the roof. They won’t have that debate with Obama because the key point he was making remains exactly right.

But what does the son and grandson of naval officers and the daughter of wealthy Goldwater Republicans know about hardship, layoffs and anger at a government that refuses to represent people struggling to get ahead?

For all their experience, they continue the legacy of government support for companies abandoning communities and their ’solutions’ have yet to rectify the real damage to middle America that they’ve done. Is it any mystery why they avoid the Big Question like the plague?

Here’s Obama’s clarification:
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You decide: who’s addressing the issue and who’s not?

(Disclaimer: I was laid off as a direct result of the latest corporate misdeeds that created the now-collapsed housing bubble, the lack of government oversight and the Fed actions that only magnified the bubble, but has only bailed out the biggest culprits after the collapse. And yeah, I’m voting angry… for real change.)