Can't you just shut up and smile?

In remarks first reported on the Huffington Post Web site, Obama said, "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.

"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," he went on. "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."

Obama's comments came at the end of a lengthy answer in which he rejected the notion that voters were passing him over simply for racial reasons, saying instead that his campaign of hope and change was having difficulty in "places where people feel most cynical about government."

Remarks taken from the Washington Post.

I know I'm not going to add anything to the intellectual discourse of this nomination process, but, as a Democrat I'm compelled to this statement: Dammit, Obama. You were making such nice strides in Pennsylvania. Can't you just shut up, smile, and coast your way to the nomination?

At the rate he's going, pretty soon, he'll be making foreign policy statements like this.