My friend Joe Carter, who blogs at Evangelical Outpost, left this comment about Obama that I wanted to highlight because it is the polar opposite of mine… I think…

Obama’s latests back-pedaling can’t be squared with his original comment. Now he says:
“What I was saying is that when economic hardship hits in these communities, what people have is they’ve got family, they’ve got their faith, they’ve got the traditions that have been passed onto them from generation to generation.

So what are these traditions being passed on? According to his original statement: gun rights, religion, xenophobia, and protectionism.
“[I]t’s not surprising, then, that 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.”
Does Obama believe that xenophobia and protectionism are, like religion, traditions that are passed on from “generation to generation”?
This is an example of what I dislike (intensely) about Obama. Whenever he (or his friends) say anything controversial, it is not that he is wrong–I don’t think I’ve ever heard him fully apologize for anything–but rather that we have failed to understood the true context.

This last point is the most interesting to me… is his failure to apologize courage or is it arrogance?