Barack: Befuddled, Taken to School [Update]
By SusanUnPC on April 19, 2008 at 11:58 AM in ABC News, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Pennsylvania
UPDATE: The April 18th blog post to which the panel refers is “Fisking Barack Obama — Deconstructing the Philly debate,” by Pete Wehner. (And, below, I’ve added a short excerpt from Wehner’s article as well as excerpts from a WSJ blog post about the McCain campaign that refers to Wehner’s article, and to the growing problems in the Obama campaign.)
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Yes, they are all arch-conservatives, but I found their observations about Barack Obama and his befuddlement in his Wednesday debate responses to be fascinating:
They make negative comments about Hillary Clinton as well, but that goes with the territory that they all inhabit. I decided to post this anyway because the observations about Obama are worth considering.
UPDATE: The Hume panel refers to “Fisking Barack Obama — Deconstructing the Philly debate,” by Pete Wehner. Here’s a very short excerpt that’s worth noting:
These issues were entirely appropriate to raise — and, in fact, several of them have not been asked of Obama before, including Obama’s relationship with William Ayers (the former leader of the Weather Underground). Obama, after all, was given a chance to respond in full, and there are few questions that should be declared out of bounds for presidential candidates. There was no “specious and gossipy trivia” (to quote the close-to-unhinged Tom Shales in Thursday’s Washington Post). And the debate did not focus exclusively on those issues; there were questions about Iraq, Iran, taxes, guns, affirmative action, and other topics. This debate, more than most, was enlightening and useful. Obama’s supporters are enraged that he would be treated like any other candidate running for president. …
In searching for that blog post, I ran across this WSJ blog article yesterday:
Political Perceptions: An Unorthodox McCain Campaign Emerges
[...]
McCain will, Martin writes, “lean heavily” on the well-funded Republican National Committee to perform some campaign functions; will decentralize his campaign by relying on “an unconventional structure of 10 regional campaign managers”; and “will rely on free media to an unprecedented degree to get out his message in a fashion that aims to not only minimize his financial disadvantage but also drive a triangulated contrast among himself, the Democratic nominee and President Bush.” The problem is, Martin notes, that nobody is sure such a strategy can work.
The recapping of Wednesday night’s Democratic debate in Pennsylvania continues, with Pete Wehner writing on National Review Online that the “debate was a bad one for Senator Obama, both substantively and in style. He was on the defensive because of associations he’s had, things he’s said, and positions he’s embraced.
Indeed, the last six weeks have been damaging ones for him. People who were once impressed with Obama are beginning to wonder if the image he projects — post-partisan, post-ideological, post-racial, a uniquely unifying and hopeful figure for America — is deeply at odds with the man himself.” Wehner, a former Bush White House speechwriter who once was higher on Obama now concludes that “for Barack Obama, the magic is gone.”
The New York Times’ David Brooks agrees, noting that over the course of the primaries Obama has moved from an unconventional leader to a run-of-the-mill politician and liberal. “He sprinkled his debate performance Wednesday night with the sorts of fibs, evasions and hypocrisies that are the stuff of conventional politics,” Brooks notes. He cited Obama’s assertion that he never attacked Sen. Hillary Clinton for her remarks about the Tuzla airport. Then he denounced taking other candidates’ words out of context — something he has done with McCain’s 100 years in Iraq comment. On top of that he “made a pair of grand and cynical promises” about taxes in Iraq, which he may very well have to renege on if he’s president. “It was inevitable that the period of ‘Yes We Can!’ deification would come to an end,” Brooks says. “It was not inevitable that Obama would now look so vulnerable.
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Read all of “Political Perceptions: An Unorthodox McCain Campaign Emerges.”
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Special thanks to C.S. for posting this video.
, the basis for the Best Motion Picture Nominee (Golden Globes) starring Brad Pitt.
, the novel by John Le Carre, a new motion picture starring Gary Oldman and Colin Firth.
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