Bitter

New York Times is reporting about a recent comment by Obama:

At the fund-raiser in San Francisco last Sunday, Mr. Obama outlined challenges facing his presidential candidacy in the coming primaries in Pennsylvania and Indiana, particularly persuading white working-class voters who, he said, fell through the cracks during the Bush and Clinton administrations.

“So it’s not surprising then that 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,” Mr. Obama said, according to a transcript on the Huffington Post Web site, which on Friday published the comments.

A while back, Eric Alterman reported on a similar comment from former Obama advisor Samantha Powers, made at the same time as the infamous monster remark:

ABC News's Jake Tapper... explained, "But I thought what was even more revealing from that interview was the elitism, the disdain that she talked about, Ohioans concerned about job losses, and they're obsessed with NAFTA. That just kind of betrayed--and that was on the record. That betrayed a sort of university elitism that we have seen before in the Obama campaign."

UPDATE: And the LA Times reports on Hillary's trade vote record.

Since 2001, Clinton has backed pacts with Jordan, Chile, Singapore, Australia, Morocco and Oman that were opposed by numerous labor, farming and environmental groups concerned that the deals contained insufficient safeguards for American workers and consumers.

As recently as November, Clinton supported a free trade agreement negotiated by the Bush administration with Peru.

Clinton's more recent critiques have cheered many trade critics, who long have complained that the pacts encourage companies to move jobs overseas.

But Clinton's campaign posture also has raised a few eyebrows. Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch division, a leading opponent of the structure of current trade agreements, said the New York senator apparently had shifted after getting "a lot of feedback from people across the country."

(Disclosure: Global Trade Watch has no preference among the candidates.)