Obama: 'Operation Patriotism'
Posted: Monday, May 19, 2008 9:18 AM by Domenico Montanaro
Bloomberg News looks at Obama's "Operation Patriotism." Obama is now regularly wearing a flag pin. "Obama, 46, may be vulnerable on the patriotism question because he doesn't have a personal narrative that people can easily understand, and not wearing a flag pin and other issues have ‘put him on the non-patriot side,' said Peter Hart, a Democratic poll-taker unaligned with a candidate. ‘He has to plant his roots,' Hart said. ‘His mother has to become an important part of his story and he has to show people he lives an all-American life, with his children and other things, so voters can say, “we understand that; he's one of us.”’”
More: "Obama plans to use speeches and campaign events to reinforce his patriotic image to America by evoking his grandparent's military background. He also plans to speak sometime this summer near Punchbowl National Cemetery in Honolulu, where his grandfather is buried. ‘My grandfather -- Stanley Dunham -- enlisted after Pearl Harbor and went on to march in Patton's Army,'' Obama said in Charleston. ‘My grandmother, meanwhile, worked on a bomber assembly line while he was gone, and my mother was born at Fort Leavenworth.'”
Obama is starting to pivot a bit on the issue of Social Security as an attempt to improve his standing with older voters. "Let me be clear, privatizing Social Security was a bad idea when George W. Bush proposed it, it's a bad idea today," Obama said. "That's why I stood up against this plan in the Senate and that's why I won't stand for it as president."
Obama will not QUITE declare victory on Tuesday, but he'll be in Iowa, which isn’t a future primary state. "Obama explained today why he will spend election night on Tuesday in Iowa, a state whose caucuses took place in January, and in doing so continued to flirt with a declaration of victory in the presidential nominating process. ‘We thought it was a terrific way to bring things full circle,’ he told reporters after buying his kids ice cream at a diner here. ‘If Kentucky and Oregon go as we hope then we think we will have a majority of pledged delegates at that point and that's a pretty significant mark,’ he said.”
“Asked if that would be tantamount to securing the Democratic nomination, Obama said no. ‘It doesn't mean we declare victory because I won't be the nominee until we have a combination of both pledged delegates and super delegates to hit the mark, but what it does mean is that the voters have given us the majority of delegates that they can assign and obviously that's what this process is about.’”
The RNC has a new Web video hitting Obama on taxes.
