It’s fully predictable that the current primary debate will galvanize public attention to this Wednesday’s night debate between Obama and Clinton. After all, Clinton has seized on the specifics of Obama’s initial speech as her last great hope to hang on and win a substantially wide victory in Pennsylvania eight days from now and turn the tide of superdelegate endorsements that has steadily leaked away. I’d also expect that she has some other late-inning surprise yet to be unveiled, though she may forgo using that if she feels this is the better ticket to overcome the long odds against her.

I also don’t think Obama intends to suspend his own innovation and determination to frame the debate as he originally intended, which means all the ingredients are present for a supercharged evening. I’ve found an overwhelming number of reference points on the internets over the weekend, each of them deserving of consideration and comment. But to do that would require hours of blogging and too much information to well absorb. Instead, I’ll simply direct you to the best I’ve found and leave most of it to you to digest and formulate your own opinions, keeping my own additions sparse.

For starters, here’s Obama, now peaking in full fight mode:

Barack Obama launched into a fiery offensive this evening in a speech before the United Steelworkers Union in Steelton, Pa., in responding to criticisms about his “bitter” remarks — going after Sen. Hillary Clinton in a way rarely seen over the course of this campaign.

“Shame on her,” Obama said, echoing one of Clinton’s own atacks on him. “Shame on her, she knows better.”

Obama said he was disappointed with her for her response and then launched into a new criticism of Clinton over her recent admission of being a hunter, and compared her sarcastically to Annie Oakley.

“She’s running around talking about how this is an insult to sportsmen, how she values the Second Amendment, she’s talking like she’s Annie Oakley! Hillary Clinton’s out there like she’s on the duck blind every Sunday, she’s packin’ a six shooter! C’mon! She knows better. That’s some politics being played by Hillary Clinton. I want to see that picture of her out there in the duck blinds.”

Obama said he is amazed and surprised by this “dust-up” but admitted that his words were chosen badly. He said he deeply regretted … that his words were misinterpreted.

He also defended himself, bringing up his own devotion to faith and his stance on the Second Amendment -– and he responded to the idea that he is an elitist.

“Now, I am the first to admit that some of the words I chose, I chose badly,” he said, “So I’m not a perfect man and the words I chose, I chose badly. They were subject to misinterpretation, they were subject to be twisted and I regret that. I regret that deeply. But when people suggest that somehow I was demeaning religion when I know that I’m a man of deep faith, somebody who in my own life has held on to faith, held on to my confidence in God during times of trial and tribulation, then it sounds like there’s some politics being played. When people suggest that I was somehow being elitist and demeaning hunters when I have repeatedly talked about the tradition that people pass on from generation to generation, hunters and sportsmen, and how I have consistently spoken about my respect for the Second Amendment, when people try to suggest that I was demeaning those traditions, then it sounds like there’s some politics that’s being played.”

He reiterated what he said was the intended message of his original comments at the fundraiser in San Francisco.

“And what really burns me up is when people suggest that me saying that folks are mad, they are angry, they are bitter after 25, 30 years of seeing jobs shipped out, pensions not fulfilled, healthcare lost, the notion that people are surprised and are suggesting that I’m out of touch because I spoke honestly about people’s frustrations, that tells me there’s some politics going on,” he said.

There’s more at the link above.

While Bob Shrum critiques his phrasing on yesterday’s Meet The Press, he defends Obama’s central point:

MR. SHRUM: Well, he’s not running for sociologist in chief, he’s running for president. So I think he wishes he hadn’t said it quite this way. I think he wishes he’d said it the same way he did the second day around.

Now, the truth is, James and I, starting 25 years ago in focus groups in Pennsylvania and polling etc., heard a lot of anger, a lot of frustration. Jobs did go up in Pennsylvania when Clinton was president, but not in places like I was born in–Connellsville, Uniontown, those small towns that have been abandoned. So there’s an element of truth in what he said. But the underlying question here is whether McCain and Clinton can tag him with the term elitist, which is what they want. I mean, here’s a guy who just finished paying his student loans, who was raised by a single mother and his grandparents, who doesn’t know what it’s like to have $100 million. So I think Senator Clinton has to be a little careful in pushing this because, frankly, she hasn’t lived in the real world for 25 years; she’s lived in a bubble. At a certain point I think it’ll come back on her, but right now it’s a blessing because it got the whole attention of the press off Bill Clinton’s rewinding and replaying the tale of Tuzla, the tape that came back out of the network vaults about Mrs. Clinton’s visit to Bosnia.

Even better is the mastery displayed by Robert Creamer, who turns the gunsight back to where most Democrats want it to be: on McCain.

McCain doesn’t lack “chutzpah.” Yesterday his campaign actually accused Barack Obama of being an “elitist” for saying that it’s not surprising that people in small Midwestern towns are bitter after seeing their standard of living systematically destroyed over the last three decades.

Damn right they’re bitter; they have good reasons to be. And most of those reasons are the economic and trade policies that have - and continue to be - championed by George Bush and John McCain.

The McCain campaign is managed by a cadre of Washington-insider special interest lobbyists. He and his current wife are estimated to be worth about $100 million. He reportedly owns eight houses. His let-them-eat-cake economic policies are based on George Bush’s failed radical conservative “you’re on your own buddy” philosophy. One after another he supported trade agreements that protect the rights of corporations, but ignore the rights of labor, and have devastated one Pennsylvania community after another. He gets most of his campaign cash from the wealthiest corporate interests around. And he has the gall to call Barack Obama an “elitist”?

This is the same Barack Obama who spent years of his life organizing out-of-work steelworkers on the south side of Chicago - people just like those who live in Allentown or Erie or Pittsburgh or the Monongehela Valley in western Pennsylvania. He stood shoulder to shoulder with them, sat at their kitchen tables, spent hours in their church basements.

He didn’t do those things as a famous candidate, but as a community organizer being paid $8,