Senator Obama is fond of saying that his father is from Kenya and his mother is from Kansas, but in the remarks he reportedly made at a fundraiser in San Francisco, the Harvard-educated Democratic presidential candidate showed his true colors as a San Francisco Democrat. “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,” Mr. Obama said. “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.”

People will be parsing these words for weeks, perhaps months. Senator Clinton, Mr. Obama’s rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, was off to a pretty good start when she said, “Pennsylvanians don’t need a president who looks down on them.” But condescension is just one of the flaws of Mr. Obama’s statement.

To begin with is the idea that religion is, like anti-immigration sentiment, a kind of bigotry that appeals to bitter people who don’t know better. It’s the idea Karl Marx had in mind when he wrote that religion is “the opium of the people.” With all the attention paid to Mr. Obama’s attendance at the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, we had been under the impression that he had a more positive view of the role of religion in American life. His comments suggest that he was influenced by his mother, who “had a healthy skepticism of religion as an institution,” Mr. Obama said in a 2007 speech quoted in this week’s Time magazine cover story on his mother.

We’ve got nothing against skepticism, and skepticism of organized religion is a healthy and longstanding tradition in American politics, from Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson on down. The constitution proscribes any religious test, ever, for any office or public trust. Yet neither is hostility toward religion, or derision of the sort Mr. Obama voiced in San Francisco, likely to resonate with a majority of American voters. It indicates an error of judgment by Mr. Obama. Many Americans, after all, come to religion not out of bitterness but out of faith and tradition and even reason.

Then there is the mistaken notion that interest in firearms is a symptom of jobless desperation. What about the counterexample of Charlton Heston, the successful actor who was president of the National Rifle Association? Or, for that matter, what about Americans from Vice President Cheney to Justice Scalia who enjoy hunting?

Finally, an aspect of the comment that has gathered less attention but is equally egregious is Mr. Obama’s lumping of anti-trade sentiments as among the false refuges of the embittered jobless. Mr. Obama himself has been stoking that anti-trade sentiment on the campaign trail. He has assailed Senator Clinton’s advisers for supporting a free trade deal with Colombia and he has faulted her for the North American Free Trade Agreement that her husband signed into law. For Mr. Obama to give guests at a San Francisco fundraiser a free trade message while campaigning in Ohio and Pennsylvania for protectionism is the sort of cynicism from which we had hoped Mr. Obama would be a change.

Mr. Obama is a politician of high intelligence and formidable rhetorical gifts, but his efforts to dig himself out of this one have so far been unconvincing. To the extent that they resonate it is that they speak to a larger phenomenon of American politics. The Democrats, while claiming to be the party of the common man, have become a party of Volvo-driving college professors, of San Francisco and Greenwich Village and Cambridge and Georgetown, while the Republicans, who are caricatured as the party of the country club rich, are in fact more in touch with the church-going and gun-bearing American public than is Senator Obama and the other leaders of his party.