...Put his left Salvatore Ferragamo in his mouth and twist:

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 gonna regenerate and they have not.

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.

Four years ago, when another Democratic Senator running for the White House demonstrated that he was, in his own way, equally far out of touch with middle class voters, he at least did so by not knowing what to order on a cheesesteak (also involving Pennsylvania, in a nice example of retroactive synchronicity), or in a Wendy's, which Mark Steyn so memorably described. Or by not understanding that the average guy doesn't fly off to another state for a weekend of windsurfing whenever the mood strikes.

Talk about a rookie mistake: Leave it to Obama to make John Kerry's Brahmin hauteur seem earnestly goofy in retrospect.

Update: The timing of Obama's latest gaffe, immediately on top of this YouTube collection of audio clips from Obama's own readings of his books, which has been making the rounds through the Blogosphere this week, doesn't help matters.