Obama: A 'hubris' shift
Posted: Friday, July 11, 2008 9:26 AM by Domenico Montanaro
It's an Ohio day for Obama. He heads to the most famous swing area in the country, Dayton, Ohio; the city was first identified as one of America's great swing battleground areas back in '72 and it's remained ever since.
Yesterday we asked if the "Obama is arrogant" storyline was on the verge of catching fire. Well, one of Obama's most ardent backers in the blogosphere, Andrew Sullivan, is wondering the same thing.
"A few things have unsettled me these past couple of weeks about the Obama campaign. It is not the small adjustments to previously held positions -- FISA, the Second Amendment, Iraq. It's a sense that Obama's ample self-regard is lapsing into hubris. The signs of this are pretty trivial on the surface, but they are troubling nonetheless. That simulated faux-presidential seal was both tacky, silly and presumptive -- a small version of ‘Mission Accomplished’ Obama could well do without. The decision to give his acceptance speech in a stadium, rather than the traditional convention hall is also an unnecessary over-reach. The night will be freighted enough with history; it needs no new drama to set it apart. And the drama of the first black man accepting the nomination - with Obama's rhetorical brilliance -- will be more than enough for impact. Lastly, I was gob-smacked by the Obamas' decision to include their children in a soft-focus TV interview."
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VIDEO: Rev. Jesse Jackson spent the day apologizing for crude remarks he made about Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama. NBC's Lee Cowan reports.
NYT wonders what's happened to Jesse Jackson. "Yet if Mr. Jackson is no longer the leader of black Democrats, it seems fair to ask if Mr. Obama, in fact, is. Some in the party say that while he has largely moved on from last year’s media narrative about whether he was “black enough” to win black votes, he has not yet, in their view, become a more respected spokesman and advocate for black issues than Mr. Jackson was and continues to seek to be. Indeed, Mr. Jackson indicated Thursday that he was not ready to leave the spotlight to Mr. Obama and exile himself from the political scene as punishment for what he called his “pejorative and personally embarrassing remarks.
“ ‘When I said that some of the messages aimed at the black church could be considered talking down to the blacks,’ Mr. Jackson said, ‘my appeal really was the moral content of the message, in order to deal with personal and moral responsibility of black males but to deal with the collective moral responsibility of government and the public policy.’ With Mr. Obama now seeking to lead the government that Mr. Jackson is criticizing, some might wonder how a President Obama would deal with a Jesse Jackson headache, if not the Jesse problem."
The
Washington Post notes, "The larger point of Jesse L. Jackson's criticism of Barack Obama -- if not the crude way he expressed it -- touched a nerve among some African American political activists who have been unhappy about the senator 's pointed critiques of absentee fathers and other problems in the black community."
It's clear that Obama isn't running to be the voice of black America. But if he wins, then who does?
As we’ve noted, Germany's Merkel
isn't thrilled with the idea of Obama using the Brandenburg Gate as a campaign backdrop but apparently it's not her call. It's the city's call.
A dark Stephen Sondheim musical about people who have killed or tried to kill American presidents is stoking the fears of some Obama supporters. "Why would a show like 'Assassins' be done at a time when we're about to have a first black president? Why would we want to put that energy out there?" the mother of the lead actor asked her son, an Obama supporter, in a story that appears on the front page of the
Boston Globe. "Liz Walker felt the production's timing exploited the real fears of many Obama voters, particularly in the black community, that harm could befall the candidate, she explained. Throughout his campaign, Obama's charisma and political style have been compared with those of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Abraham Lincoln, all transforming figures in American history and all targets of assassination."
