Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, April 7th, 2008, Barack Obama, running for the Democratic nomination for President,

makes controversial remarks at a fundraiser in Pennsylvania. In those remarks Obama described small towns in the Midwest that had lost jobs and

how residents quote get bitter they cling to guns or religion or antipathy towards people who aren't like them.

The quote goes on much longer as did the controversy over the quote here to discuss it and

how this moment kind of previewed a lot of the themes of the next 10 years in politics is as always

Nicole Hammer of Columbia. Nicky hello and welcome back welcome to week two.

Hey Jody. So this is where we should confess to people that sometimes our definition of this day is a little

loose because Obama made these comments on April 6th at night at a fundraiser.

So April 7th they had been said but they had not been reported which we will talk about because the comments didn't leak out until a few days later

But listeners this is you know this is our confession and if you have a real issue with this then you know you're just going to

have to deal with it so I mean look you're the one who's working on the Obama

oral history project for Columbia so I'm you're gonna you're gonna be in the

driver's seat for this one but can you remind people like how big of a controversy were to be in the driver's seat for this one. But can you remind people, like,

how big of a controversy were these comments

in the nominating process of 2008?

So this was a huge controversy, because by this point in time,

it was still a pretty close race between candidate Obama and candidate

Clinton and Clinton I think had decided by this point in time that the way that

she was going to win was by winning over white working class Democrats.

And so she could point to this what became known as the bitter

...