John Podhoretz has a really sharp take on all this:
Well, it has finally happened. Barack Obama has done what Democratic candidates for president invariably do - he has revealed the profound sense of unearned superiority that is the sad and persistent hallmark of contemporary liberalism. Obama's statement today that small-town folk "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" may be the most distilled example of this train of thought I've ever seen. Obama's astonishing sentence offers a syllogistic string of superciliousness: Gun ownership is equated with religious fanaticism, which is said to accompany hatred of the other in the form of opposition to immigration and support for trade barriers. It drips with an attitude so important to the spiritual well-being of the American liberal - the paternalistic attitude that says, "Oh, well, people only do thing differently from me because they are ignorant and superstitious and backward" - that it has survived and thrived despite the suicidal impact it has had on the achievement of liberal political goals and aims.
Today Obama says his words were "ill-chosen" and that he "didn't say it as well as I should have." Say what as well as he should have? That rural white America clings to guns and religious because of bitterness? That these people don't exercise their First and Second Amendment rights in a manner he finds pleasing, and that the only explanation is years of neglect by the federal government has left them superstitious and backward? There is no right way to say that. The icing on top is that the audience for whom these comments were intended, the snobbish San Francisco elite that leads the Democratic wing of the Democratic party, will defend them as some kind of hard truth. Like Podhoretz says, they just can't help themselves.