Now that Barack Obama has issued the requisite non-apology apology in the usual form — he “deeply regrets” that he offended people not with his sentiments but with his sentence structure — the media will likely let Obama off the hook. Not Newt Gingrich, who makes a rare foray into the presidential campaign from the bleacher seats with a searing analysis that hits a bullseye, and one obvious to anyone who hasn’t just focused on the word “bitter”:

If you go to the most expensive private school in Hawaii and then move on to Columbia University and Harvard Law School, you may not understand normal Americans. Their beliefs are so alien to your leftwing viewpoint that you have to seek some psychological explanation for what seem to be weird ideas.

They can’t really believe in the right to bear arms.

They can’t really believe in traditional marriage.

They can’t really believe in their faith in God.

They can’t really want to enforce the law on immigration.

Therefore, they must be “bitter” and “frustrated.”

This is the closest Senator Obama has come to openly sharing his wife’s view that “America is a mean country”. Not since Governor Dukakis have we seen anyone so out of touch with normal Americans. It makes perfect sense that it was in a fundraiser in San Francisco that he would have shared the views he has so carefully kept hidden for the entire campaign.

This distills the Obama viewpoint about middle America to its essence. He assumes that gun ownership, religious faith, and a desire to enforce border security grows out of a mental defect or simple petulance. He cannot understand any of it as deeply held values or beliefs because they are all so foreign to him. His cure is a huge, whopping dose of government intervention to replace all of it. That’s the hubris, the condescension, and the elitism rolled up into a precise point.

The one sentence wasn’t the only point that offends here. Ben Smith at Politico has a video clip of a portion of this appearance. Ask yourself this: isn’t Obama implying that middle America is, well, racist in this quote? Emphases mine:

Here’s how it is: in a lot of these communities in big industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so long, and they feel so betrayed by government, and when they hear a pitch that is premised on not being cynical about government, then a part of them just doesn’t buy it. And when it’s delivered by — it’s true that when it’s delivered by a 46-year-old black man named Barack Obama (laugher), then that adds another layer of skepticism.

Update: Rick Moran discusses Obama’s Allentown Syndrome, and why it’s a mirage.