Obama: Time to cover the other guy?
Posted: Thursday, August 07, 2008 9:14 AM by Mark Murray
“Obama may be the fresh face in this year's presidential election, but nearly half say they're already tired of hearing about him, a poll says. With Election Day still three months away, 48 percent said they're hearing too much about the Democratic candidate, according to a poll released Wednesday by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. Just 26 percent said the same about his Republican rival, John McCain.”
“Obama came up empty in a stunt to pitch his energy policy to drivers at Florida gas stations,” the New York Daily News writes. “Team Obama Wednesday announced to great fanfare it would stream ads ripping John McCain on screens at dozens of filling stations around the Sunshine State - only to have Gas Station TV pull the plug at the last minute. ‘We avoid politics in general,’” Gas Station TV CEO David Leider said.
The Washington Post delves into a topic that hasn't gotten a lot of attention lately, but did get some during the primaries: Is Obama willing to get tough on his opponents? "Such attacks have raised worries among Democratic strategists -- haunted by John F. Kerry's 2004 run and Al Gore's razor-thin loss in 2000 -- that Obama has not responded in kind with a parallel assault on McCain's character. Interviews with nearly a dozen Democratic strategists found those concerns to be widespread, although few wished to be quoted by name while Obama's campaign is demanding unity.”
“‘Democrats are worried," said Tad Devine, a top strategist for Kerry who thinks Obama must stay on the high road. ‘We've been through two very tough elections at the national level, and it's very easy to lose confidence.’”
Lots of blind quotes: “‘If somebody attacks you, you have to frame the attack: “This is the same old politics, or better yet, the Bush-Rove politics,” something Obama has done well, said one Democratic strategist. ‘At the same time you do that, you have to counterattack. You don't want to look like a whiner. You want to look tough.’”
“Said another Democratic consultant: ‘There needs to be a negative McCain track beyond the Bush policy stuff. One of the great strengths of the Obama campaign has been to not listen to the D.C. chattering class. They have a plan and they stick to it. But clearly, the D.C. chattering class are all wringing their hands.’”
The Washington Post's Marcus looks at Obama's need to start feeling the pain of blue-collar voters. "But much as John McCain needs to cultivate his party's still-skeptical base, Obama needs to tend to the anxieties of blue-collar Democratic voters in states such as Ohio who voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton in the primary. More broadly, he needs to speak to the cascading economic worries felt by voters of both parties, or no party at all."
She interviews Obama and gets him to sound both clinical and then empathetic. “‘Not in the view of most economists,’ Obama replies. ‘I'm well aware of the argument [about] singling out oil companies rather than soda pop manufacturers.’”
“Yes, but what does Obama himself believe? ‘I think oil companies are amoral. They want to make as much money as they can for their shareholders, which is what corporations do,’ he says. ‘The difference is the nature of the kind of outsized profits they make that may have no relationship to their investments or their production. The fact, for example, [that] the shortage of refinery capacity could actually increase their profits so the less they invest the more they make indicates that you are not dealing with someone making widgets out there.”
The upcoming Sunday New York Times Magazine features a cover story by Matt Bai asking the question: "Is Obama the End of Black Politics?"
From the story: "The generational transition that is reordering black politics didn’t start this year. It has been happening, gradually and quietly, for at least a decade, as younger African-Americans, Barack Obama among them, have challenged their elders in traditionally black districts. What this year’s Democratic nomination fight did was to accelerate that transition and thrust it into the open as never before, exposing and intensifying friction that was already there. For a lot of younger African-Americans, the resistance of the civil rights generation to Obama’s candidacy signified the failure of their parents to come to terms, at the dusk of their lives, with the success of their own struggle — to embrace the idea that black politics might now be disappearing into American politics in the same way that the Irish and Italian machines long ago joined the political mainstream.”
