Tag: Barack Obama

Clinton and Obama

I’m watching Hillary Clinton’s speech right now, and the atmospherics are interesting. The crowd behind her is much younger than the one that was with her in Iowa, which shows that she learned from Barack Obama’s event last week. For that matter, she looks younger. So does Bill.

Obama’s speech was characteristically excellent, but it differed little from the one he delivered in Iowa. For that matter, it differed little from the one he might have given if he’d won tonight. Could he have been unprepared for defeat?

Clinton’s speech, at least in a surface kind of way, makes me think of McCain’s — pedestrian, but warm enough to compensate. Clinton does not often strike people as warm, so this could prove to be pretty effective.

She’s promising “to end the war in Iraq the right way,” a mild shot at Obama’s unqualified pledge to bring the troops home.

She’s really pushing the youth thing: “I want to thank the young people in New Hampshire who came out. They asked the hard questions, and they voted their hearts and minds. And I really appreciate it.”

So now what? She survived a near-death experience and won New Hampshire, the first and arguably the most important primary. Clearly nobody knows anything, least of all me. I’ll point out only that for the past year, Clinton has seemed like the inevitable nominee with the exception of just the past five days. Now she’s the inevitable nominee once again. Unless and until she isn’t.

The Obama effect

Is it possible that Barack Obama is falling victim to the Bradley effect? The Bradley effect takes its name from Tom Bradley, the African-American mayor of Los Angeles who was comfortably ahead in the polls in the 1982 California governor’s race.

Bradley ended up losing to a white Republican, George Deukmejian. It turned out that a small but decisive proportion of white voters had told pollsters they were planning to vote for Bradley but in fact ended up voting for Deukmejian. Some speculated that those white voters had lied to pollsters because they didn’t want to be perceived as racists.

Obviously you can vote for Hillary Clinton without being a racist. But the results so far certainly don’t jibe with the polls.

Obama could still win, especially since the college towns’ votes haven’t been counted yet.

On second thought: O-Fish-L, in his inimitable way, argues that it’s not likely Obama suffered from the Bradley effect in a Democratic primary — especially in New Hampshire, whose Democrats are overwhelmingly liberal.

Enough for Obama and McCain?

If the turnout predictions reported by Boston.com’s James Pindell turn out to be accurate — or, as he thinks, prove to be on the low side — then there should be enough independent votes out there to float Barack Obama and John McCain. Pundits have been looking at the independent vote as a zero-sum game, and as Obama has risen, McCain has dropped back a bit closer to Mitt Romney. But that may not be the way things work out.

Channeling no one but himself

New York Times reporter Michael Powell asserts that John McCain is borrowing rhetoric from Barack Obama. Yet in his only example, he shows that McCain is borrowing from himself:

Mr. McCain admits to admiring Mr. Obama’s appeal as a “wonderful thing” and has taken to borrowing a line or three. He has been channeling Mr. Obama, calling on Americans to “serve a cause greater than their self-interest,” a theme from his campaign in 2000.

Indeed it is a theme from McCain’s 2000 campaign. So why does Powell say that McCain is “channeling Mr. Obama”?

A bad week for Chris Daly

I have been watching with interest as Boston University journalism professor Christopher Daly gets raked over the coals for criticizing a Washington Post reporter who wrote a story about Barack Obama’s ties to Islam without sufficiently observing that those ties are non-existent. So, far, though, I’ve refrained from writing about it.

And I’m going to remain in the shallow end of the pool, at least for now. I’m heading up to New Hampshire to cover a Giuliani event for the Guardian, and I don’t want to make the same mistake that Daly did: committing pixels to screen without giving it quite enough thought.

Still, I am amazed at the amount of vitriol Daly has received, including a scorching note from Post executive editor Leonard Downie taking the legendary Jim Romenesko to task merely for linking to Daly’s missive. Today, the dispute makes the New York Times, which is why I’m taking note of this now.

If you’re interested, here are a few links that the Times doesn’t give you:

  • The original Post story, by Perry Bacon Jr.
  • A critical column by Post ombudsman Deborah Howell
  • A short item I posted in which I endorsed a withering critique of Bacon’s story that had been published at CJR.org
  • Daly’s critique and a follow-up he wrote in response to the attacks he received
  • Downie’s letter to Romenesko (scroll through letters for other posts, both attacking and defending Daly)
  • Two very tough anti-Daly posts by journalist Seth Mnookin (here and here)

My quick take: Bacon’s story was already under heavy attack before Daly weighed in because of the peculiar manner in which it had been constructed. Supposedly the story was about false rumors being perpetrated by fringe elements of the paranoid right that Obama’s Muslim roots are a lot deeper than he’s let on, or even that he’s some sort of secret agent for Islamist extremists.

Even though Bacon describes Obama as a church-going Christian near the top of his story, the rest of the article wallows in rumorville without quite making it clear that those rumors had been thoroughly debunked months earlier. Unfortunately, given the mainstream media’s role in sliming past Democratic presidential candidates, especially Al Gore and John Kerry, liberal bloggers were on full alert and perhaps overreacted to the flaws in Bacon’s piece.

As far as I can tell, Daly’s principal mistake was to whack Bacon for being 27 years old. If an experienced editor had run Bacon’s story through the mill for just another 15 minutes, the result probably would have been a piece that no one could complain about. Reporters deserve no less, regardless of whether they’re 27 or 51, an age I (ahem) do not pull out of a hat.

Postscript: Politicians in general spend more time being seen going to church than ministers, especially just before an election. So why would the Associated Press assert that Obama’s decision to go to church yesterday was “a rejoinder to the e-mailed rumors that he is a Muslim and poses a threat to the security of the United States”? Obama attended a Congregationalist church. He is a Congregationalist. Hello?

Mooning Obama

I don’t need to say anything about the Washington Post’s shockingly bad story today about persistent but false rumors that Barack Obama is a Muslim, and about how that may affect his presidential candidacy. Paul McLeary has already hit every low point at CJR.org.

But just to pile on a little — the Post fails to point out that one of the purveyors of religious hatred against Obama, the online magazine Insight, is owned by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church.

An awkward moment for Obama

My friend and former Phoenix colleague Michael Crowley has beaten me to it.

Yesterday I was listening to the podcast of “Meet the Press,” which this week featured Sen. Barack Obama. For the most part, it was standard-issue Tim Russert, as Obama easily batted away questions of the tired old “how can you be for campaign-finance reform when you raise money from special interests” variety.

But, as I was driving past Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Custom House, I nearly had to pull over for this exchange:

Russert: [O]ther critics will say that you’ve not been a leader against the war, and they point to this: In July of ’04, Barack Obama, “I’m not privy to Senate intelligence reports. What would I have done? I don’t know,” in terms of how you would have voted on the war. And then this: “There’s not much of a difference between my position on Iraq and George Bush’s position at this stage.” That was July of ’04. And this: “I think” there’s “some room for disagreement in that initial decision to vote for authorization of the war.” It doesn’t seem that you are firmly wedded against the war, and that you left some wiggle room that, if you had been in the Senate, you may have voted for it.

Obama: Now, Tim, that first quote was made with an interview with a guy named Tim Russert on “Meet the Press” during the convention when we had a nominee for the presidency and a vice president, both of whom had voted for the war. And so it, it probably was the wrong time for me to be making a strong case against our party’s nominees’ decisions when it came to Iraq.

Obama — shading the truth then, telling it straight now? Not a very good campaign slogan. Or as Crowley writes, “Obama might argue that there’s a difference between speaking as a nominee and speaking about the nominee. Still, even by his own account, this episode hardly seems to live up to the tough standards he set last night” — referring to a rousing speech Obama had given in Iowa the night before.

In July 2004, Obama went beyond cooling down his rhetoric in order to accommodate John Kerry and John Edwards, and his explanation for that now is cynical. Obama’s flagging campaign has caught a few sparks in the past week. It will be interesting to see whether he did himself any real damage yesterday.

Update: Media Matters reports that Russert creatively sliced and diced Obama’s comments from three years ago. No surprise there. But what concerns me is what Obama said yesterday.

Obama’s cell-phone problem

Is technology costing Barack Obama points in the polls? National Public Radio yesterday broadcast a fascinating report on the looming meltdown of polling as we know it.

Officials with the Obama campaign believe their guy is receiving disproportionate support from young, black and Hispanic voters. All three of these groups are more likely than the rest of the population to have ditched their land lines in favor of a cell-phone-only lifestyle. And pollsters rarely call cell phones, for obvious reasons. (How would you like to receive a cell-phone call from a pollster?)

According to the NPR story, polling experts believe the cell-phone conundrum isn’t out of hand yet, and that the sampling population can be adjusted by weighting it differently. Clearly, though, technology is changing the face of polling. If Obama does better than his polling numbers in New Hampshire, we’ll know one of the reasons why.