US:BARACK Obama's controversial characterisation of small-town voters as bitter has offered Hillary Clinton a chance to revive her faltering campaign ahead of next week's key primary in Pennsylvania.
Mr Obama has admitted that he chose his words poorly when he said that voters in Pennsylvania's small towns, embittered by job losses, clung to God and guns rather than voting on economic issues. "If I worded things in a way that made people offended, I deeply regret that," he said.
Mrs Clinton has seized on the comments, however, to portray Mr Obama as a condescending elitist who is out of touch with ordinary Americans. Campaigning door-to-door yesterday in her father's home town of Scranton in northeastern Pennsylvania, Mrs Clinton said that her rival had not properly explained his remarks.
"I think his comments were elitist and divisive . . . I think this is a very significant concern that people have expressed," she said.
"You don't have to psychoanalyse or patronise people to conclude that we have problems."
The storm began last Friday when an audiotape emerged of a speech Mr Obama made at a fundraiser in San Francisco the previous Sunday. Explaining his difficulty in winning the support of some working-class voters in Pennsylvania's small towns, Mr Obama said they had 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," he said.
Mrs Clinton hammered away at Mr Obama at every campaign stop she made over the weekend, suggesting that he showed a fundamental lack of understanding of the attitude he was describing.
"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," she said.
"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. People don't need a president who looks down on them. They need a president who stands up for them."
Presenting herself as a down-to-earth fighter for ordinary Americans in contrast to her opponent, Mrs Clinton said she had learned to shoot when she was a child, although she added that she was not a firearms expert.
"You know, my dad took me out behind the cottage that my grandfather built on a little lake called Lake Winola outside of Scranton and taught be how to shoot when I was a little girl," she said.
"I have gone hunting. I am not a hunter. But I have gone hunting."
Republican John McCain's campaign also criticised Mr Obama's remarks, which dominated coverage of the presidential campaign throughout the weekend.
Mr Obama's supporters fear that the controversy could fuel fears among some Democrats that he will not be able to attract enough white, working-class votes to defeat Mr McCain in November.
It also reinforces the impression that Mr Obama lacks the common touch, inviting comparisons to unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidates Michael Dukakis and John Kerry.
Last year, Mr Obama puzzled an audience of Iowa farmers when he mused about the price of arugula at Whole Foods, an upmarket supermarket chain that has no branches in the state.
Earlier this year, his wife Michelle told a group of women in Zanesville, Ohio, where the average annual income is about $40,000 (€25,500), that she spent $10,000 a year on extracurricular piano, dance and sports classes for her two daughters.
Mrs Clinton, whose joint income over the past seven years with former president Bill Clinton was $109 million, often appears more comfortable than Mr Obama among working people, eating everything she is served and knocking back beer and whiskey with voters.