The superficial vs. content

This is the "cling to guns or religion," comment that Obama made that still draws so much judgement. One can say it's stereotyping bitter (not every!) small town people, and if we read the whole quote for INORMATION it's also full of UNDERSTANDING AND EMPATHY for people who he describes as watching their jobs go overseas and their communities crumble. It's so annoying that we get these quotes out of context over and over and over, like Dana Milbank who turned humility into hubris.

"But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. 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."