By Jonathan Allen, CQ Staff

YORK, Pa. -- The media frenzy surrounding Barack Obama ’s recent comments about economically distressed small town Pennsylvanians has been overblown, according to many Pennsylvania voters. And they say it won’t influence their vote. But others say the remarks could come back to haunt him in Tuesday’s primary or a general election if he wins the Democratic presidential nomination.

Obama has come under fire from Democratic rival Hillary Rodham Clinton , presumed Republican nominee John McCain and others since the liberal Web site Huffington Post revealed last Friday that Obama told an audience at a San Francisco fundraiser that rural Pennsylvanians “get bitter” and “cling” to guns, religion, opposition to trade and distaste for other groups because of their economic situation.

“It was a little thing,” said Bill Scheffer, a 77-year-old career truck driver from Bedford. “It doesn’t matter.”

But Scheffer describes his voting preference as “Anybody but Obama.”

Here in South-central Pennsylvania, where many small town voters believe in their right to bear arms and are just as fervent about their religion, Obama’s comments might be expected to evoke uniform condemnation. But even some supporters of other candidates are willing to cut the Illinois senator a little slack.

Cliff Rowell, a Republican, agreed that the comments have received too much scrutiny.

“I think they made a mountain out of a molehill,” he said.

But Mark Treider of York, a commercial pilot who flew F-4s in the Air Force, said he was offended by being stereotyped as a “hayseed.”

“He came flat out and said that people in the middle of the country, and Pennsylvania, they tote guns, they go to church they’re xenophobes, they’re racists and things like that and that’s simply not true and I think it’s an underestimate of what the country’s really all about,” Treider said. “The working class people around here are what makes this country,” he said.

Treider re-registered as a Democrat this year so he could vote for Clinton as part of conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh’s “Operation Chaos” effort to keep the Democratic primary competitive.

But he also says Clinton would make a better president than Obama.

With an electorate already heavily polarized, any shift among Democrats from Obama to Clinton will be at the margins of the small set of Pennsylvania voters who remain undecided, according to Muhlenberg College professor Chris Borick, who conducts polling in the Lehigh Valley and across the state.

“It will play or have an effect on the margin. If you look at it, a lot of the voters who would be most offended by that comment are most likely going to support Hillary Clinton anyway. That’s not to say, again, that moving a few of those five or six [percent] undecideds in one direction wouldn’t be affected by a comment like that,” Borick said. “But the general election it would be interesting to see, especially among independents.”