Two days later, they’re still talking about an incident that occurred after Tuesday’s Wisconsin Primary was called for Barack Obama:
If it were a basketball game, the refs might have blown the whistle on Barack Obama for elbowing Hillary Clinton out of the way.
Clinton was seven minutes into her speech Tuesday night, shortly after being projected to lose the Wisconsin primary, when Obama bounded onto a stage and all the cable news networks — after a brief split-screen moment — cut away from her to him.
“Take it now!” Fox News anchor Brit Hume was heard saying. The freshman senator proceeded to speechify in a Houston arena for 46 minutes, hijacking the television spotlight and — in a move he seems to have perfected — upstaging his Democratic rival.
As Obama went into overtime — while the rest of Sen. Clinton’s speech in Youngstown, Ohio, went unheard by the country — her aides were stewing over what they see as media favoritism toward the Illinois senator. And political analysts marveled at Obama’s ease in capturing a sizable chunk of prime time on one Tuesday night after another.
“Whatever happened to equal time?” Clinton spokesman Phil Singer asked yesterday.
Obama spokesman Bill Burton denied any Machiavellian plotting, noting that Clinton had been scheduled to speak an hour earlier. “We hit the stage on time,” he said. But he did not minimize the importance of such speeches: “When you have the opportunity to broaden your audience outside the four walls that contain your event, it’s an important moment.”
Deliberate or not, it was a pretty dramatic event. I was watching MSNBC’s coverage on Tuesday and they were giving full attention to Hillary’s speech. Then, when Obama hit the stage in Houston, they went into split-screen mode for at least a minute. While Hillary spoke, you could hear, softly, the roar of the crowd in Houston. And then, when Obama began to speak they just cut Hillary off and went to him.
For me, it just underscored the extent to which this guy has overshadowed her throughout this campaign.
If you missed it here’s how it unfolded on CNN:
