Obama on defense as Clinton fights to the 'bitter' end

"You go into 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," Obama said.

In a closed-door session at a speech in San Francisco last week, the Democratic presidential candidate suggested that people in those areas of Pennsylvania had been overlooked by their government.

"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. And 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."

The Clinton campaign pounced on the statement, almost as soon as it hit the press. "I saw in the media it's being reported that my opponent said that the people of Pennsylvania who faced hard times are bitter. Well, that's not my experience," said Hillary Clinton.

Clinton said the people she has meet in Pennsylvania are resilient, optimistic and positive, and said "Pennsylvanians don't need a president who looks down on them, they need a president who stands up for them, who fights for them."

Obama initially tried to explain and defend his remarks Friday night, but acknowledged, "I didn't say it as well as I should have."

"Obama made a mistake, and now that he has admitted it, he regrets it, he has perhaps denounced and distanced himself from his comments, I think Obama will rebound," said Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, adding that the candidate "has shown over and over again that he's resilient."

Brazile, speaking on ABC's This Week With George Stephanopoulos on Sunday, said "Obama's problem is that he is a constitutional law professor and he often speaks in a tone that tries to educate people, and of course he got in trouble."

But Brazile, who served as Al Gore's 2000 campaign manager, offered some advice to the Illinois senator. "He's also a community organizer, someone who's made the sacrifice," she said. "I think Obama the community organizer must reemerge this week, a critical week in his political life, and not the constitutional law professor," she said.

James Carville, a Democratic strategist who supports Sen. Clinton, also sees a problem for Obama. Carville helped elect Bill Clinton in 1992 and defended Clinton's economic record in bringing jobs to Pennsylvania, saying that Obama's remarks raised "some slight historical inaccuracies." Speaking on NBC's "Meet The Press," Carville said, "Jobs in Pennsylvania went up substantially under Bill Clinton.  Most of these jobs were lost in, in the early '80s in fact."

Carville also took on Obama on guns and religion. "The gun culture has been part of Pennsylvania forever, for a long, long time," said Carville. "I don't think that Senator Obama really understands the relationship of Pennsylvanians or Midwesterners or Southerners and, and their guns.  I mean, I, I have eight guns myself.  I'm hardly bitter about things," he said.

As for the religion issue, Carville disagreed with Obama's implication that people cling to faith because of bad economic conditions. "The people have been going to church in Pennsylvania for a long time, a really long time," Carville said.

But Carville did not think Obama's mistake would be catastrophic. "I don't know if it's devastating. I think it was a poor choice of words," Carville said. "But his cultural history is way, way off, way off."