The first reaction from the Obama campaign to John McCain’s pick of Sarah Palin as his VP was to diss small town America. His campaign put out a statement which said in part:

Today, John McCain put the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency.

There is a pattern of elitism in the Obama campaign. Remember that this is the same Barack Obama who described working-class voters as Americans who “…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.”

Now Obama has distanced himself from his first harsh response to the Palin pick, blaming it on a ‘hair trigger’ reaction by his staff. Ben Smith at at Politico.com reports:

At a stop in Monaca, Pa., Barack Obama seemed to distance himself from his campaign’s first, harshly critical response to the Palin pick.

“I think that, uh, you know, campaigns start getting these, uh, hair triggers and, uh, the statement that Joe and I put out reflects our sentiments,” he said, according to the pool report, apparently criticizing his staff for going overboard, as he did occasionally in the primary.

He was referring to a more gracious statement of congratulations he issued later with Biden, which he then reiterated.

Let’s see: he tells Rick Warren tough questions are “above my grade grade,” and now he is allowing senior advisers to make ‘hair trigger’ statements. Does this sound like the kind of president we want with his finger on a nuclear trigger?