Bittergate Backfire?

Don’t miss this post by Josh Marshall, which says the Clintons have said things in private about the unwashed masses of small towns that were far less charitable than what Obama said publicly.

The Clinton campaign tried to capitalize on Bittergate by handing out “I’m not bitter” stickers. MSNBC reports that the Clintons tried to claim that the stickers were a spontaneous grassroots phenomenon, but later admitted that they, um, had them printed and passed them out.

I like this bit from the MSNBC story:

But the issue doesn’t seem to be sticking. Clinton himself has been silent on the issue. But at the first two events of the day, the campaign has sent one of Carolina’s hometown boys out to push the issue before Clinton takes the stage. Tom Hendrickson, a Clinton supporter and former Democratic Party chairman, included a reading of Obama’s comments in his introduction of Clinton.

“Senator Obama, don’t pity us and think that we’re bitter and frustrated,” he said in Winterville this morning. “We are hard-working family folks who are smart, and we get it. We don’t need pundits to tell us what to think.”

Hendrickson repeated the sentiment at a later stop in Winston, but dropped the direct mention of Obama as the source of the quote.

In both instances, Hendrickson’s speech evidenced little reaction from the crowd, which had been waiting for the main event for over an hour, and appeared to have little tolerance for a parade of surrogates.

By the third stop of the day in Goldsboro, Hendrickson did not even take the stage.

Maybe folks don’t need pundits to tell them what to think, but I take it folks also don’t need Clinton surrogates to tell them what they feel.