Obama '08?

Obviously it was a joke (and I don't think Thomas takes the O'Brien as running mate part seriously either), but it could well be both a joke and a test balloon.

Obama Assails Bush

Walter posted an article called "Obama in '08?" from the Chicago Tribune in the Democrats gloat thread.

At a breakfast fund-raiser for McCaskill in Kansas City, Katheryn J. Shields, a Democrat who is the chief executive of Jackson County, which encompasses Kansas City, said of Hillary Clinton, "She's great." But when asked if Clinton should be the Party's nominee, Shields said, "That would be a hard one." The outgoing executive director of the Greene County Democrats, Nora Walcott, was more direct. Though she said she was to the left in the Party, she feared that Clinton's liberal credentials would alienate Missouri voters. "You've got to tell the people in Washington not to nominate Hillary," she told me. "It would do so much damage to the Missouri Democratic Party." Clinton's obvious shifts to the center frustrate Walcott on two counts, she said: "I disagree with the way she's going to the right, but my biggest problem with it is that it's not working. People don't believe she's a moderate."

Uncertainty about Senator Clinton's real views seems to be more troublesome than the views themselves. She has always been less liberal than some believe, and at times her centrism is ostentatious, as when she spoke in favor of a law banning flag-burning. Clinton has reached out to anti-abortion voters, she refuses to call for a troop withdrawal from Iraq, and she has become a new friend of Rupert Murdoch, the proprietor of the onetime Clinton-bashing New York Post and Fox News, who is hosting a fund-raiser for her this summer. All of this recently led the Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen to write, "Does she know what she believes? Do we know what she believes? Hillary, help us. Who the hell are you?"

Clinton, who is expected to easily win a second Senate term in New York, refused to be interviewed for this article; she has apparently decided not to discuss Democratic political strategies for now. But her chief strategist, Mark Penn, said that Democrats in conservative states would benefit from a Clinton candidacy. "She has a wildly enthusiastic base, much larger than anything we have seen in a long time. People say about her what they say about President Clinton: wherever he went, votes followed." Penn also said that Clinton could win over skeptical voters in red states. She has done so in upstate New York, where she continues to be popular.


Only a few nationally known Democrats have been invited to Missouri to speak on Claire McCaskill's behalf; one was Obama, whom she described as "so popular that we have to get him back." Obama returns the compliment: McCaskill, he told me, "is a terrific candidate who is deeply rooted in Missouri and understands the people of Missouri." He added, "A successful swing-state candidate can and should stand for progressive values, but they've got to appeal to common sense and pragmatism as opposed to ideology. I think what doesn't work in these places is a sense that you are ideologically liberal."

Obama, however, is not exactly standing still. He recently hired two nationally experienced political consultants, Anita Dunn in Washington and David Axelrod in Chicago. The senator suggested that a presidential bid is a matter of when, not if.

"We've visited 25 states since taking office," he said. "And in each of those states, we might have 2,000 people show up at a rally. And we'd get back to D.C. and we'd realize we didn't have e-mail addresses for any of those people. That might be a useful thing to have when, you know, I'm running for something and might be looking to raise some money."

"I think he is unique," said Illinois's senior senator, Richard J. Durbin (D). "I don't believe there is another candidate I've seen, or an elected official, who really has the appeal that he does." As for the 2008 presidential race, "I said to him, 'Why don't you just kind of move around Iowa and watch what happens?' I know what's going to happen. And I think it's going to rewrite the game plans in a lot of presidential candidates if he makes that decision."