Obama '08?

Let's give it a couple of days, before making predictions about how the RNC will move numbers - several on the other side made bold predictions about Obama getting no bounce, and turned out to be very wrong.

Now, to me, it's obviously a room full of old, white people. They aren't really representative of diversity in the slightest. But of course, to many, that doesn't matter and they will lap up every attack on Obama and the Liberals that they can get.

I expect Romney and 9/11 weasel boy to attack Obama, Huck and Palin not to.

Cycloptichorn

What I find troubling is a whole of the republican party - both old and new - are supporting this amateur named Palin to become the president in the event something happens to McCain - a 72 year old man who has had a bout with cancer. She has absolutely no clue about international issues - and probably zilch about domestic ones.

I find troubling that the whole of the democratic party-both old and new-are supporting this amateur named Obama to become the president next Jan.

I am trying to figure out this thing the Dems are touting called "change". The whole Obama campaign hinges on his ability to "bring change to Washington", yet other than his rhetoric he has nothing to demonstrate he'll be able to change anything in Washington. In fact, there is extremely little in his portfolio to indicate he's willing to compromise any of the standard Democratic agenda, even for the goal of promoting change in Washington. From what I can see, the Democratic definition of "change" is simply a change from Bush and the Republican administration. However, changing long-standing policies and inner workings of Washington is simply not on the Obama menu. Instead they are just about swapping the old Republican administration with an old Democratic administration.

Contrast this with McCain, who's fought the Republican Party and worked bipartisanly with Democrats on issue after issue (Campaign Finance, voting to confirm Bryer and Ginsburg for SC, tackling the tobacco industry, voting against the Bush tax cuts, Climate Stewardship Act, etc.,). Combine this with Palin's challenges to the Republican leadership in Alaska and you are left with the unavoidable conclusion that the real party of change this year is the GOP.

I'm looking for discussion from the Obama supporters as to what they see in Obama (besides flowery words) that convince you he'll be able effect real change, not just swapping parties in charge.

I received this e-mail from the Obama campaign last night:

I wasn't planning on sending you something tonight. But if you saw what I saw from the Republican convention, you know that it demands a response.

I saw John McCain's attack squad of negative, cynical politicians. They lied about Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and they attacked you for being a part of this campaign.

But worst of all -- and this deserves to be noted -- they insulted the very idea that ordinary people have a role to play in our political process.

You know that despite what John McCain and his attack squad say, everyday people have the power to build something extraordinary when we come together.

Both Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin specifically mocked Barack's experience as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago more than two decades ago, where he worked with people who had lost jobs and been left behind when the local steel plants closed.

Let's clarify something for them right now.

Community organizing is how ordinary people respond to out-of-touch politicians and their failed policies.

And it's no surprise that, after eight years of George Bush, millions of people have found that by coming together in their local communities they can change the course of history. That promise is what our campaign has been about from the beginning.

Throughout our history, ordinary people have made good on America's promise by organizing for change from the bottom up. Community organizing is the foundation of the civil rights movement, the women's suffrage movement, labor rights, and the 40-hour workweek. And it's happening today in church basements and community centers and living rooms across America.

Meanwhile, we still haven't gotten a single idea during the entire Republican convention about the economy and how to lift a middle class so harmed by the Bush-McCain policies.

It's now clear that John McCain's campaign has decided that desperate lies and personal attacks -- on Barack Obama and on you -- are the only way they can earn a third term for the Bush policies that McCain has supported more than 90 percent of the time.

They hardly "mocked" the value of community organization, just pointed out the differences between being a mayor or governor (where you have employees, you manage a budget, you mediate between political parties and government agencies, you make far-reaching decisions affecting the lives and well-being of folks) from that of a community organizer.



I'm all for this...lets' get Obama back to that valuable community organizing role...he's certainly better suited for that....leave the Presidency for the grown-ups.

Probably shouldn't have put in that last comment...now they'll be accusing me of mocking community organizers....

Obama holds steady in the polls after the first two days of the convention. No Palin speech reaxs in this poll tho, so McCain is likely to get a bounce tomorrow or the next day.

Still, it would have to be a heck of a bounce to do anything other then achieve parity.

Cyclo0ptichorn

$1,000 each would soon change that.

Ha, you forget that a bounce is just that, a bounce....eventually you come back to earth and so will Obama. He'll be dropping back to the 44/45% range within a week and just as McCain gets his bounce....eventually they'll be right back in that tight race. In fact, CBS poll shows that Obama's already come down and the race is once again tied at 42% each.

That CBS poll has both a small sample size and a pretty heavy party ID for Republicans- - actually 6% more then the last poll they took, and look, McCain is 6% higher! Magical!

I don't discount it completely, but I would have to see quite a few others before I worried about it.

Cycloptichorn

"worried about it"!!!??? Are you kidding.

Relatively small population compared to your Gallup, but this poll included 15% more registered democrats than registered republicans. And this poll (of 15,000 adults)shows that the margin between folks affiliating as Democrats vice Republicans has reduced two points over the past month.

There would seem to be an increasing trend in favor of the Repubs and the convention just might give us the momentum to get over the hump to stay....you might want to start worrying after all...

Nah, we're cool. 5.7% is still one of the highest advantages the Dems have had in modern history.

Cycloptichorn

What I'm really interested in seeing is a poll taken immediately after the republican convention.

Even right after won't be enough - you need to wait until next Monday to give the bounce time to mature. Like I said above, I do expect the Republicans to go up a little, and that takes a few days to mature.

Tomorrow, the numbers ought to be pretty good for McCain - if Palin goes over as well as they say.

Cycloptichorn

Maybe if he had a swagger like Marion Barry or a knack for vicious hyperbole like Jesse L. Jackson Sr. or a military bearing like Colin Powell. Then, perhaps, Barack Obama could put an end to questions about his masculinity.

"Does Barack Obama have testicular fortitude?" read a recent headline on the History News Network, an online publication hosted by George Mason University.
Paul Gipson, president of a local steelworkers union in Indiana, endorsed Hillary Clinton's bid for president, saying "what we gotta have" is "an individual that has testicular fortitude."
What is Obama to do?

Obviously, it's not enough to battle your way to the Democratic nomination for president of the United States. You can vanquish a field of primary candidates. You can win campaigns in the far northwest, in places where there are no blacks to speak of. You can raise a war chest that exceeds the annual budget of a midsize town.

You can walk a fine line between being too black for whites and not black enough for blacks. But here you are, just weeks away from the presidential election, being called on to prove that you are man enough -- without coming off as an angry black man.

"Barack Obama, as an African American man, has a real challenge," Estelle B. Freedman, professor of history at Stanford University, said Sunday on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered." "Some of the criticism of Obama as being too aloof or not going after red meat enough or not being aggressive enough is really questioning his masculinity in some ways.
"But given the historic stereotypes about fear of African American men's masculinity and fears of their aggression, Obama has been successful because he embodies an earlier model of black male politicians for whom respectability and reason were tickets into full citizenship."

But not successful enough, apparently.
On Tuesday, Richard Cohen wrote on the op-ed page of The Washington Post that Obama's appearance on a TV talk show Sunday "had me wondering if, as a kid, Obama ever got a shot in the mouth on the playground, he'd glare at the bully -- and convene a meeting."

Arita L. Coleman, assistant professor of Black American Studies at the University of Delaware, deconstructs such criticism in an article that appeared June 2 on the History News Network.
"Historically, our leaders have been white. Thus, whiteness and masculinity have also become synonymous," she writes. That women like Clinton and now Sarah Palin, the Republican vice presidential nominee, can be considered more masculine than Obama "bears historical significance" in that it grows out of a 19th century view of race which holds whiteness as masculine and dominant and blackness as feminine and submissive.

Palin's claim to masculine fame is that she is a moose hunter and hockey mother of five who can morph into a pit bull. She also has a penchant for drilling oil -- "drill, baby, drill," her supporters chant. She thinks Obama is a wimp, in part, for his reluctance to do so.
The manly response by Obama would be to sic his pit bull -- vice presidential nominee Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware -- on her. Then Obama can pick up where he left off at the Democratic National Convention: going after the Republican presidential candidate, John McCain.

"If John McCain wants to have a debate about who has the temperament and judgment to serve as the next commander in chief, that's a debate I'm ready to have," Obama said, to the sustained applause of nearly 80,000 conventioneers. Then came the knockout punch: "John McCain likes to say that he'll follow bin Laden to the Gates of Hell, but he won't even go to the cave where he lives."

If traditional campaigning can't convince voters that Obama is man enough, then perhaps he should wear his baseball cap backward and saunter cockily, a model of black masculinity that America is more familiar with. He could vow to off his rivals with the political equivalent of what Palin does to a moose.

-from a blog by Courtland Milloy

Transcript of Obama's appearance on Letterman:

http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/09/11/obama-letterman-pigs/

A new, rare poll from West-Virginia shows Obama surprisingly close, just 5 points behind McCain, with 17% undecided. But it doesnt look like the Obama campaign is well-positioned to pick up on any opportunities here; while they fished deep and wide for new votes in as untraditional and far-flung states like Montana and Georgia, West-Virginia has apparently not been on the Obama map.

I watched the "Forum on Service" yesterday on CNN. A couple of minutes of McCain, all of Obama. Shut it off as soon as it was done and haven't seen anything about it yet this morning, here or elsewhere. Maybe it wasn't that big a deal.

I sure hope people were paying attention, though. It was a refreshing appearance. The topic was "service" and therefore the issues discussed were limited, but there were issues! Thoughtful questions were asked and Obama answered them thoughtfully. He seemed so relaxed, so authoritative, but also so energized -- so glad to be talking about this stuff! And eagerly rattling off, in an accessible way, some of his many policies related to service. At one point he noted that Judy Woodruff wanted him to wrap up so they could do a commercial and he smiled and said "I have lots more, Judy, but I'll tell you about it after the break..."

It was a good moment, combination of wonk and passion and humility.

The content was also very good. Interesting stuff about how a narrow slice of the population (rural, poor) bears a disproportionate burden of military service, and how to rectify that. Talking about his $4,000 tuition credit in exchange for public service. Talking about how it was more difficult for him to go out and do that community service work than it would have been for him to coast to a Wall Street Job, and how he wants to make the former easier for more young people and recent college graduates to do.

Anyway, fun to watch. Several parts had me nodding emphatically, I'll see if I can find a transcript to highlight them.

I just saw an appearance of Obama with Bill Clinton, after their 2 hour closed "lunch" together in Clinton's office in Harlem.

I think the Obama camp is going to benefit greatly from BC's help, and it seems as if BC is ready to give it...

I think BC was impolitic in his remarks about Jesse Jackson/Obama in Florida (during the primaries), but I think it would be right if Obama offered an apology to him for allowing the "Clinton is racist" meme to flourish. In short, I like the idea of Obama enlisting Bill Clinton in these last 50+ days, and I don't have any problem with him kowtowing a wee bit to the only Dem to win 2 terms since FDR.
-he knows a little bit about how to win...

I gotta disagree with that -- far from "allowing it to flourish," he stomped on it but good. ("They're both good people.")

I really think Bill's been bratty about requiring kowtowing.

But yeah, it seemed like it was a good lunch, and I'm happy that Bill seems more on-board now. And I agree that Bill still has prodigious gifts.