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Disheveled former senate candidate Mickey Kaus knocks it out of the park with this one:

Obama's talk Saturday night wasn't as bad as his San Francisco lecture. It was worse, in this sense: It's one thing to say those poor people in Pennsylvania are hostile to gay rights, say, because all their "jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them"—and that they'll change when they get the jobs back. It's another thing to say those poor people will change when they get their jobs back when you've had two years to get them their jobs back and have conspicuously failed. At that point, blaming "false consciousness" becomes a semi-delusional way of dancing around your own inability to remove the root of that false consciousness. A little humility is in order. If true humility is unavailable, false humility will do.

Maybe Obama was cynically making a pitch to his immediate audience—a small crowd of Massachusetts donors who might be expected to respond to the idea that they were defending "facts" and "science" against confused know-nothings. But Obama should know, especially after the 2008 San Francisco incident, that a candidate can't keep his words confined to a fundraiser. And this apparently wasn't a closed-to-press event like the one in S.F. We didn't have to rely on a donor/blogger like Mayhill Fowler to spill the beans. Reporters reported on it. Obama couldn't have been trying to cyncially play to the donors—he's not that naive! This must be what he really thinks.

Now I'm scared! What yesterday's comments suggest isn't just that Obama will get clobbered in the midterms. It suggests that after he gets clobbered he won't be able to adjust and turn the setback into a longterm victory the way Bill Clinton did. Clinton reacted to his 1994 midterm loss by acknowledging his opponents' strongest arguments and pursuing a balanced budget and welfare reform. Obama seems more inclined to just tough it out until the economy recovers and the scared, confused voters become unscared and see the light. Meanwhile, he'll spend his time in a protective cocoon.

Read the whole thing.