Apparently, he’s not connecting with the average voter:
DENVER _ If a focus group of a dozen Latino voters in Colorado is any indication, Senator Barack Obama still has a way to go to connect with ordinary people.
The Annenberg Center for Public Policy ran a focus group here this morning, with five voters supporting Mr. Obama, three supporting Senator John McCain and four undecided. After listening to them for two hours, Peter Hart, the Democratic pollster who helped oversee the session, said his main conclusion was that Mr. Obama has still not reached voters on a human level or conveyed who he is or what he is like.
“This person is closer to Adlai Stevenson than he is to Bill Clinton,” Mr. Hart told reporters after the session. “There is not the sense of that visceral connection.”
(…)
[M]any said [Obama] was “intelligent,” and they knew he played basketball. But they couldn’t come up with more specifics about him or a sense of his personality.
“We’re seeing too much of a one-dimensional Obama,” Mr. Hart said. “We’re not seeing the human side. There’s nothing wrong with the big rallies, and you have to do that and that’s important, but it’s equally important for us to get a sense of what he’s like as a neighbor, what he’s like as a human being. There needs to be a much more personal dimension than has been developed at this stage of the game.”
This is the same problem that Kerry had in 2004, Dukakis had in 1988, and George H.W. Bush had in 1992. And we know what happened to those guys.
