Are you looking for a clear, short audio file of the controversial statement about “bitter” small-town Americans which Obama made immediately after the Getty mansion fundraiser in San Francisco on April 6, which I had exclusive coverage of last week? If so, you’re in luck, because I just uploaded the best, cleanest and most audible version available. And it’s only 44 seconds long — much more manageable than the 50-minute-long file that originally cropped up on the Web. It also sounds much better than some of the other clips that have subsequently been made available. This is THE best version you will find!

Click HERE to listen to the audio clip — an mp3 file — on its own Web page.
(Alternately, you can right-click [Windows] or control-click [Mac] the link to download the mp3 to your computer.)

Here is a transcript of Obama’s words (this is an EXACT transcript — versions posted elsewhere had some minor errors):

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, a lot of them — 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’ve gone 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. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, and they cling to guns, or religion, or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

This speech was made at the mansion of Alex Mehran, just a few blocks from the Getty event I covered, and just a few minutes afterward.

I’m not going to join the chorus of pundits analyzing this speech — everything there is to say has already been said! I’m just providing a service to make the audio available to everyone. Feel free to download it and post it on your own blog or site.