President Bill Clinton on the politics of Fear vs. Hope…

Here’s a report from an actual attendee of the now infamous San Francisco Fundraiser for Obama.  Unfortunately, the soundbites and his impromptu response have droned on and on on the MSM outlets, and as the case usually goes, the context is not provided. 

I was hoping someone would come forward and tell a more complete and contextual account of the response Obama gave to a question from the audience at the April 6 Fundraiser in San Francisco.  I was fortunate to have attended an earlier event where Obama spoke – his ability to listen to and acutely understand your question and then provide a well thought out answer, full of detail, passion, compassion and pragmatism was remarkable [plus he's a really witty guy, and very comfortable with who he is].  So, thank you to Mr. David Coleman for stepping forward and providing some needed perspective to this out of control spin on Obama’s latest ‘gaffe’.

I Was There: What Obama Really Said About Pennsylvania

By:David Coleman

Posted April 14, 2008 | 11:54 AM (EST) [From The Huffington Post]

Last Sunday evening I attended the San Francisco fundraiser that has been the center of recent political jousting. The next day, when asked about the talk Obama delivered, I too commented about his answer to a question he was asked about Pennsylvania. Over the past week, though, I have had a Rashomon-like experience concerning those remarks.

Clinton, McCain, and media pundits have parsed a blogger’s audio tape of Obama’s remarks and criticized a sentence or two characterizing some parts of Pennsylvania and the attitudes of some Pennsylvanians. In context and in person, Senator Obama’s remarks about Pennsylvania voters left an impression diametrically opposed to that being trumpeted by his competitor’s campaigns.

At the end of Obama’s remarks standing between two rooms of guests — the fourth appearance in California after traveling earlier in the day from Montana — a questioner asked, “some of us are going to Pennsylvania to campaign for you. What should we be telling the voters we encounter?”

Obama’s response to the questioner was that there are many, many different sections in Pennsylvania comprised of a range of racial, geographic, class, and economic groupings from Appalachia to Philadelphia. So there was not one thing to say to such diverse constituencies in Pennsylvania. But having said that, Obama went on say that his campaign staff in Pennsylvania could provide the questioner (an imminent Pennsylvania volunteer) with all the talking points he needed. But Obama cautioned that such talking points were really not what should be stressed with Pennsylvania voters.

Instead he urged the volunteer to tell Pennsylvania voters he encountered that Obama’s campaign is about something more than programs and talking points. It was at this point that Obama began to talk about addressing the bitter feelings that many in some rural communities in Pennsylvania have about being brushed aside in the wake of the global economy. Senator Obama appeared to theorize, perhaps improvidently given the coverage this week, that some of the people in those communities take refuge in political concerns about guns, religion and immigration. But what has not so far been reported is that those statements preceded and were joined with additional observations that black youth in urban areas are told they are no longer “relevant” in the global economy and, feeling marginalized, they engage in destructive behavior. Unlike the week’s commentators who have seized upon the remarks about “bitter feelings” in some depressed communities in Pennsylvania, I gleaned a different meaning from the entire answer.

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