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Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro critiqued former President Barack Obama’s infamous “bitter” comments from 2008 in an interview this week, as part of a broader conversation about Democrats struggling to win back the working class.
Obama made the controversial comments during a fundraising event in San Francisco, arguing that small towns in the Midwest saw jobs disappear over the previous decade and have begun to “cling” to harmful beliefs.
“And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are going to regenerate and they have not,” Obama said at the time. “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.”
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Shapiro told The Atlantic in an interview published Wednesday that Obama’s comments likely insulted the working class rather than motivate them.
“I think his understanding of the challenges in those communities was real. But I think instead of offering his prescription for how he’d make it better, he insulted the very folks who were suffering,” Shapiro said.
He compared the comments to former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” remarks at a New York City fundraiser, saying he sympathized with the working-class voters who turned to President Donald Trump as a result.
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“We can’t ignore the fact that elections are binary choices. And so you’re asking people, at least in the last case, to choose between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump,” he told The Atlantic. “We can have this kind of theoretical conversation about Trump, but, like, it was always Trump versus somebody.”
Fox News Digital reached out to Obama’s team for comment.
In the same interview, Shapiro also denied what former Vice President Kamala Harris alleged in her book, “107 Days,” which included discussions of Shapiro and others she vetted to be her running mate.
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Harris said Shapiro had asked her staff lots of questions, including “how he might arrange to get Pennsylvania artists’ work on loan from the Smithsonian.” She also accused him of wanting to be involved in every decision and said she reminded him, “a vice president is not a co-president.”
“That’s complete and utter bull—-,” Shapiro said in response to the unflattering description of him in her book. “I can tell you that her accounts are just blatant lies.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Shapiro praised Trump as a gifted communicator but said he’d lied to voters to get ahead.
Shapiro is widely considered a possible presidential candidate in 2028, given his status as a popular governor of a purple state.
Fox News’ Hanna Panreck contributed to this article.
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