Joe Gandelman ponders the political impact of Barack Obama’s bitterness statement:
Can it derail the Obama campaign?
Most assuredly it will likely break Obama’s growing momentum in Pennysylvania and will completely oscure the recent Bill Clinton Bosnia debacle.
Also: his comments were specifically about smalltowns and Clinton would be almost politically negligent if she didn’t raise them in small towns in Pennsylvania. On the other hand, the way Clinton is characterizing them — suggesting Obama looks down on all people in smalltowns and really doesn’t want to help them — may not pass an accuracy test (but will pass a political test).
And, in politics, all that matters is how people perceive situations. Obama’s intent in making the statement, although I frankly think it is indicative of an underlying elitism, don’t matter so much as how people, and especially people in Pennsylvania and Indiana perceive them. If they buy into the immediate reaction that the Clinton campaign is running with, then it will most assuredly hurt Obama in both of those primaries, and is likely to blunt his momentum in Pennsylvania at the very least.
As Gandelman notes, there are three questions that the remaining ten days of campaigning will answer:
–Will this do-in Obama in Pennysylvania, untightening what appeared to be a tightening race? Will Clinton now win by the whopping margins showed in polls a few months ago? Or is Obama’s on-the-round organizing still enough to keep it a close horse race?
–Will this start a new cycle of Obama on the defensive? Cable and radio talk shows will have a field day expanding on this theme and running Obama’s comments starting on Monday.
–Can Obama’s camp now rebound from what is clearly a big political error. Just as Clinton’s campaign has showed signs of being poorly run, what does this say about what advisers are telling — or not — telling Barack Obama? And if they are giving him advice is he listening?
If Barack Obama’s perceived dismissal of the values of small-town America become the story going forward, then he could have problems in the weeks ahead.
There is, for Obama, one saving grace in all of this. His opponent is Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the idea that the Wellsley College and Yale Law School educated wife of a former President who has made $ 109 million since leaving office can connect with small town America is, quite honestly, absurd.
April 12th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
from swimming freestyle:
“This video is exactly how Obama should have raised the issue: In the environment these voters live and with an appropriate anger. Rural working class voters have gotten the shaft. They have every right to be frustrated and even bitter about what’s happened to them.
Obama now finds himself having to address the issue defensively, Unfortunately, the issue will now likely be obscured by the hysterical anti-Obama rants by the Clintons and McCains. Obama gave them that gift when he spoke in San Francisco last weekend.”
http://swimmingfreestyle.typepad.com