Obama's Now a Regular Candidate with Problems

If the bubble has not burst, it will likely do so on Tuesday.

The erosion of support for Barrack Obama is eating away at his polling numbers and his ultimate electability. His onetime clear, even double digit, lead over Hillary Clinton is gone in national polling. She now leads for the first time in three months.

His double digit lead in North Carolina is down to mid-single digits. His likely share of the white vote there will undoubtedly hit new lows, perhaps enough for an upset there. He quit gaining in Indiana and Clinton is pushing the lead back up.

His favorability ratings for the general election are also dipping and support among independents is waning. His illusionary support among Republicans is also a thing of the past. He will likely "mobilize the base" of the GOP better than any recent candidate from his party.

More and more people are focusing on the message and his positions, which can no longer by glossed over with "hope and change" generalities. He will likely have to run as a "liberal" in an electorate that self-identified by two to one as conservative (Gallup 2008).

More unfortunately, the Bradley effect may be emerging. I anticipate that a significant number of white voters will not tell pollsters that they are disillusioned with him, but the results will likely start showing up tomorrow. I think that there is an excellent chance of him doing 3-5 points worse than the latest polls would indicate. time will tell.....

This is before the Ayers flap has gotten legs and received the same media attention as Rev. Wright. We also would have to be naive to think that Rev. Wright will be silent for the balance of the campaign. My instincts saythat he will again emerge in some public speeches that will cause more damage.

Superdelegates also know this and have been withholding blanket bandwagon endorsements....but in the end, they will likely have no choice but to endorse him. The Democratic Party cannot be seen to have stolen the nomination from their first black candidate, no matter how flawed and weakened he has become.

Ads in Congressional races have already featured Obama as the target of a "nationalized" campaign. The Louisiana 6th District race went from double digit Democratic leads to 3 points in two weeks. Anyone in politics watching that knows poison when they see it.

Ironically the things that made Obama appear so appealing are the very traits that made the GOP Right reluctant to jump on the McCain bandwagon. His independence, non-partisanship, and willing to work across party lines. McCain has walked the walk, while Obama seems to have seized on the themes from focus groups and political strategists, having never demonstrated any of those qualities in his brief political career.

Weeks ago I started hitting on these themes and I am convinced that they are real issues. They reflect the judgment of the candidate who would be President. Who he listens to and who he relies upon for support. Obama has the problem of going from a Leftist Chicago constituency to a Center Right general electorate. A tough transition for a veteran politician and a near impossible task for a newbie, who has never ran in a tough campaign until now. This latter point demonstrated clearly by his "veneer answers" as we used to call them in collegiate debate: the first layer of a response that is not designed to be probed, a shallow "sound bite" in modern jargon. His Rev. Wright answers reflected this characteristic and then not get better with either age or depth. His "capital gains tax moment" in the last debate was another example. Far from benefiting from a long campaign, Obama wears thin from time and scrutiny. The days of being all things to all people are plainly over.

Randy Mott

Being Eaten by the Duck of Political Correctness

The Democratic Party consists of the old FDR coalition and the modern special issues groups on abortion, gay rights, antiwar (whatever one is pending), and other one-issue causes. The core constituencies have always been union workers, the elderly, minorities and urban so-called "elites." In recent times there has been a void as to a common issue or theme across these groups, accept for design of retaining or regaining power.

Image from Rush Limbaugh (April 24, 2008).

This election cycle has witnessed the unveiling of the fissures in the old FDR coalition. One group seems to have lost a place at the table altogether, the Democratic pro-free trade internationalist. Strong national defense advocates were quietly shuffled out the door over the last thirty years. Those that remain have learned to lay low or risk the Lieberman treatment. Now we have the minorities and the unions backing opposing candidates and about ready for their own war.

The dilemma that their party faces is that they have created the very nightmare that their Superdelegate rules were designed to stop: a candidate who won the party popular vote but appears destined to be a train wreck in the general election. The Democrats got here by imposing different rules based on race. Barrack Hussein Obama is the first affirmative action Presidential candidate. No one in the party or in the so-called mainstream media dared to air the problems with his past and his singularly uneventful political career because he was black.

Harsh words? Well, I guess so. When anyone makes this suggestion, as Ms. Ferraro did, they are shouted down in public, while privately everyone knows their comments are right on the money. Could a first-term white Senator with no noticeable evidence of leadership on a single issue have gotten as far as fast as Senator Obama?

Obama achieved this incredible rise to power by playing the race card every time someone suggested that he had a fault or a problem. Through surrogates or campaign memos or otherwise, any criticism about him personally being a problem was immediately viewed as racist. So everyone inside the Democratic Party had to keep a lid on the information that everyone knows makes Obama a very flawed and vulnerable candidate.

His preacher (a fact known early last year, when Obama kept him offstage), his Weatherman terrorist buddy (widely known in Chicago and not even slightly obscured), and his shady friends in Chicago business...all of this was no surprise to anyone who looked into his past. His wife's anti-American rants may have been a surprise, but remember she stayed in Chicago when he was elected to the Senate and attended Rev. Wright's circus every Sunday according to her own words.

Obama's lightweight take on the issues and leftist voting record...... widely known in Washington among every member of the Senate. In a country where voters still identify themselves as conservatives about two to one over liberals, Democrats' success in getting elected nationally has depended upon their obscuring their liberalism. Obama tries to do it; Kerry tried to do it. Obama let his liberal cat out of the bag in his San Francisco remarks.

If voters in earlier primaries had seen Rev. Wright's sermon excerpts and Michelle Obama's "never proud of America" confession, does anyone think that Obama would still have a lock on the nomination? How about the unrepentant terrorist that held a fund-raiser in his home for Obama in 1995? Talk about this candidate being part of the "blame America first" crowd is not figurative; it is the literal truth.

Finally, I have to say as someone who has been a public speaker and debater since Junior High School, I am not surprised that a self-impressed orator type of speaker, like Obama, is not good on his feet without a script. We have seen him capable of reading a teleprompter speech and reciting the single answer to a question from the briefing book. He has not demonstrated anything but ineptitude on his feet without a memorized text in his head or on the screen. This is so much a liability for him that asking tough questions is viewed as unfair or even racist by his supporters and the media (oops those are the same thing). Of course, we all knew that he had never had a tough campaign in his life, especially against a Republican who might not be as afraid to highlight the guy's weak spots.

Democrats did this to themselves. Nothing that has come out to date, the information that has polarized the Democratic Party and destroyed Obama's appeal to middle class voters, was a secret. Rev. Wright publicly sold CDs of his rants, which probably helped pay for his $1.6 million house. Ayers has been on the radio in the last year with his radical and foolish 60s syndrome. They did not see it, like every "mark" in a con game, because they did not want to see it. They wanted a charismatic new guy to make them feel good and to justify their "fuzzy-headed" conviction that they have always been right and the public was just too stupid to see it.


For some weeks now, I have been confident that the Obama train was headed for derailment. It is too late to stop him at the convention. The Democrats will never have the power to say no to the black voting block that has been their most reliable constituency. It is truly affirmative action and political correctness to a fault that has gotten them into this mess. It is no accident and no quirk. The problem that their party is in reflects the shallowness and superficiality of their mantra. In the end, they will likely do as much damage to race relations as no one could have imagined possible two years ago.

Somewhere along the road the self-avowed civil rights advocates lost the fundamental premise of color-blindness. Slowly and inevitably now, they are being devoured by their own doctrine, being eaten by a duck, awkwardly and painfully.

Randy Mott

Someone tell the non-urban temperature stations that it is warmer...they don't know it.

It is widely known by climatologists and ignored by the media that many of the surface temperature stations are now "corrupted" by being locatedin areas affected by "urban heat islands." The systems try to adjust for this and other effects, but it is a subjective exercise in the end.

The objective measure would be to just lookat rural temperatures and if there was major warming, they would show it? Right?

They don't......

Randy Mott

OBAMA DROPS ANOTHER “NOT READY FOR PRIME TIME” BOMB ON HIMSELF

Before one of those famous Democratic fat cat private fund-raisers, when he was free to be myself (or so he thought), Barrack Obama continued to display why the major parties in normal elections don’t let a novice get this close to the Presidential nomination. In a pitched battle for blue collar, small town voters in Pennsylvania, Obama explained his take on the situation: "And it's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." Reminiscent of his "typical white person" comment, these remarks illustrate the basic "disconnect" between the Obama campaign pitch and his real self.

Attributing people who hold these views as solely the product of economic problems is a standard liberal line. That Obama would say so is no surprise, as is his refusal to recant the thrust of the remark. The amazing part of the quote, however, is its tone of condescension and elitism. In other words, "these poor stupid people do not know what to think" and their sometimes deeply held views on religion, gun ownership, or illegal immigration are merely delusional, based on their own lack of intelligence or information. This is the part that will haunt his campaign to the end. It flies in the face of his alleged desire to put partisan divisions behind us and take a centrist, high-road.

Senator Obama shares the view of the elitist Left that they know better than other Americans, that increasing the scope and size of government is necessary despite what the average American thinks, because the economically “oppressed” are delusional about religion, gun ownership and secure borders. The liberal argument is that people “cling” to these conservative-associated views because they are ignorant of their own “true interests,” which lie with the Left and the redistribution of wealth through public welfare and handouts.

The attribution of these viewpoints to displaced anxiety over economic misfortunes is just plain inaccurate and not factually supported by the evidence.

As to religion, where Senator Obama’s “expertise” was finely honed under the tutelage of Reverend Wright, the data in the United States simply do not support the simplistic view that educated people are less religious. GSS 1972-2004 Cumulative Datafile [“30.4% of those with a graduate degree attend religious services weekly or more, a statistically significant proportion, higher than any lesser educated group”]. See Burton et al., “Education and Fundamentalism,”30 Review Of Religious Research 344 (1989)(“contrary to our expectations, converts to Fundamentalism were not less edcuated people.”).

Obama’s mantra about religion as a clutch for the desperate is, of course, contradicted his own self-proclaimed Christianity on the campaign trail (outside of San Francisco). The San Francisco speech expresses what I suspect is his real belief that societies as in Western Europe that have evolved to moral relativism away from religion are intellectually superior to the United States (hence Michelle Obama’s “mean country” and "never proud of America" references).

How about those oppressed, bitter people buying guns? “Gun owners, on average, are somewhat better educated than their non-gun-owning peers…” Dizard et al GUNS IN AMERICA: A READER (NYU Press 1999), p. 169. Many people enjoy hunting and many others want the right to defend their families and home. They do not do so because they are misplaced economic anxieties.

Next, how about those “oppressed and bitter” people who oppose liberal immigration laws rewarding those who got to the US illegally? Studies show that concern over illegal immigration does not neatly correlate with economic insecurity. See Burns & Gimpel, “Economic Insecurity, Prejudicial Stereotypes, and Public Opinion on Immigration Policy,” 115 Political Science Quarterly (2000) pp.201-225. In general, those with more education and income feel less threatened by immigration laws that allow more people into the country, but it is totally unclear that this trend applies to tolerance for illegal immigration. See MTSU Poll results (2008)(the lowest income group supported a guest worker program by the highest percent and 73% of those with income under $40,000 supported a path to citizenship for illegals). It is impossible to make cut-and-dry observations about the relationship of income or education to support for controlling illegal immigration. In fact, some data suggest that those who follow public issues are far more likely to oppose illegal immigrant amnesty, for example: “…among those do know enough about the bill to have an opinion, there is roughly a three to one level of opposition over support.”
Newman, Gallup Polling (2007).

Finally, on NAFTA, where Obama has been using his declared “opposition” to woo blue collar voters, while privately having aides reassure Canadian government officials that it is just for popular political consumption, do the “bitter” folks simply reflect economic insecurity? At the time of the NAFTA debate, there was no clear correlation between personal economic levels and support or opposition to NAFTA. See Uslaner, “Trade Winds: NAFTA and the Rational Public,“ 20 Journal of Political Behavior (December 1998). Both Democratic candidates – deeply involved with various union political activitists – have used NAFTA as a whipping boy for economic problems in the Rust Belt states that they need to win the nomination. While Obama cynically tells the San Franciso high-rollers that the anti-NAFTA sentiment is just the low income folks “clinging” to an excuse, he uses the issue for exactly that purpose. NAFTA is not the cause of Rust Belt job losses, which can be traced to Obama's union backers as much as any other cause. NAFTA has caused a net increase in U.S. jobs according to all of the nonpartisan, professional studies. Obama's San Francisco remarks seem to recognize these facts and clearly display his own hypocrisy in using NAFTA as an issue.

So Barrack Obama wants to attribute a variety of religious and political views of small town America to their lack of education and bitterness over their economic plight. This is an important creed of liberalism – coming from the most liberal guy in the U.S. Senate – in that liberals have to explain why lower income people do not support them, despite their innate ability to know better what is good for these voters.

Observations, including those made here, that this candidate is not ready to run for national office seem to be accurate. As he nears a lock on the nomination, despite losing all big primary states but his own, and despite losing the Democratic white vote by a wide margin, Obama is posed to implode. Slippage began with the Rev. Wright flap – which is still a gaping wound ready to reopen as soon as Obama turns onto to the main campaign highway. There is no doubt that when really pressed this candidate will make more slip-ups, principally because he has campaigned as something that he fundamentally is not, a nonpartisan, centrist seeking to accommodate divergent views into a new consensus. Every glimpse we get of the real guy tells us what far from the truth that pitch really is……..


Randy Mott

Michelle Obama and daughters attended every Trinity Church service

While Barrack Obama went to Washington as a Senator, his wife and two daughters stayed in Chicago. Accordingly to the "fluffy" biographically piece on Michelle Obama, she claims to have attended Trinity Church "every Sunday":

"After Barack was elected to the U.S. Senate, Barack and Michelle choose to keep their children in Chicago, where Michelle continued her career as well. "We made a good decision to stay in Chicago so that has kept our family stable," Michelle Obama told the Chicago Tribune. Every Sunday the family attends services at the Trinity United Church of Christ." http://www.squidoo.com/michelle-obama-pictures-biography

While he may claim, incredibly so, that he never heard this stuff (Obama ver. 3.02), the facts seem to show that he is misrepresenting things at best:

1. His family attended and clearly if Wright's rant were shocking to them, he would have known. He also subjected his daughters to this racist nonsense. A healer?

2. In his first book, Obama says that he purchased and took tapes of Wright's sermons with him to Harvard. If he did not attend the sermons, he certainly heard them later.

3. Before his announcement ceremony, Obama pulled Wright from doing the prayer. Because he knew it could be controversial. If the events in March 2008 were all news to him, why did he do that one year earlier?

4. The church web-site and bulletin routinely included black liberation rants and other extremist information and essays. Obviously Obama knew of the content of what was being handed out routinely at the church.

5. The pattern of these sermons went on for twenty years, not just a few isolated cases . Even the first sermon Obama reported hearing included this nonsense.


Obama's claims that Rev. Wright's racist rants were unknown to him are no more credible than Hillary's Bosnian sniper experience. But the media is giving Obama another pass. The campaign will not do so.

Look for the guy to sink faster than Dukasis did.

Randy Mott

More reaction to Obama's finger in the dike speech

Several things are now clear from Obama's Phillie speech and the reaction to it.

1. Obama heard Wright's rants and was well aware of the extreme allegations of Wright's radical black theology. Obama's early statements that he had not heard these crazy theories and rants from Wright in his 20 years at the church were LIES. Obama's first instinct in the controversy was to lie about his own involvement.

2. Obama still tries to portray his own tolerance of the Wright's extremism as a decision based on balancing the good and the bad and part of some metaphysical process. The truth, which everyone knows, is that Obama is half-white and an Ivy-Leaguer and was entering politics in a black section of Chicago and needed "black bona fides." He sat and listen, gave money to the church, and supported it and Rev. Wright because doing so HELPED HIM POLITICALLY at the time. Now it doesn't, so he can say that he always disagreed with the extremist rants.

3. Obama still cannot afford to alienate his black base (without their 85-90% turnout for him he would be watching Hillary get the nomination). So he still does not completely disavow Rev. Wright's viewpoints, but tries to explain them in a "broader context." Here is some real pandering, when he compares Rev. Wright's leading a congregation of 4,000 people with this ideological hate with his white grandmother sometimes being uncomfortable walking down the street approaching young black males. The comparison to Ferraro's accurate but politically incorrect observation about his success hinging on him being black is also disingenuous. Obama desperately tried to find white "equivalence" to balance Rev. Wright's accusations against America. In this, while the rhetoric worked for an instant, he failed miserably.

4. Obama, as always, is weakest on the "close." Somehow his experience in tolerating and promoting black extremist theology makes him qualified to lead us to anther place. We will allegedly get to this other place by "uniting" around the policies of the most liberal elements of our society, which have been rejected in every election where they showed their true colors. Unity to Obama means simply for the conservatives to quit criticizing his liberal fixes - which mostly include taking someone else's money and giving it to other groups to buy their votes. "Unity" solves the problems by letting Obama and other liberals use our money to pay the bills for "hope." Obama's "unity" and "hope" are neither. The disconnection between his generic calls for achieving the common good and his policy prescriptions to do so does not go away or get fixed by warm feelings. Obama's relative lack of any significant policy achievements or even original new proposals remains there behind the smoke and mirrors.

In the end, Obama's appeal is for voters to trust him because he has a vision. We are asked to trust him after he lies and obfuscates about Rev. Wright's brutal attacks on America, after his wife's consistent statements saying the same things in softer words, while he offers no new proposals or original solutions to any of these issues and has a mediocre track record for doing anything but making speeches. That is the deal that will not "close."

Randy Mott

Obama's Phillie Speech

Okay... he still wants to be the uniter...is that a surprise? Nice speech...good rhetoric.

This is undoubtedly make his supporters happy. Senator Obama tries to "turn the corner" as we used to say in debate. But I don't think that the speech ends the controversy or gives him a bye on the situation he allowed to develop.

When Obama needed black community bona fides in Chicago, he sought out this church and Rev. Wright to get them. When he needs to be acceptable to white voters, he rejects the views that he heard for twenty years [after of course, denying that he ever heard them]. Which is it? Was he lying when he said he never heard this type of viewpoint or is he lying when he says that he understood Rev. Wright's viewpoint while disagreeing with it?

Two Obamas- one for the Chicago voters where he started out and one now for his national campaign. Several versions of the Rev. Wright controversy, all of which seem mutually exclusive.

Add in Michelle Obama's speeches - consistent themes that reflect the Rev. Wright take on the country albeit in softer terms - and you should be asking how we can be fooled by this act. I do not think the issue will die this easily.

Randy Mott

Obama's Self-Destruction

A survey of the blogs' sphere and the news clips suggest that the Rev. Wright story has "legs" and is breaking into a full trot. Tracking polls show Obama slipping dramatically ......

The story is amplified by Michelle Obama's "never proud of America" comment and the Pledge of Allegiance and flag lapel pin stories.

Throw in his own campaign foreign affairs advisor telling an interviewer that he is not ready to be commander and chief......

It really looks like the Democratic Party was done in by its own pedantic political correctness. They just refused to vet this guy because he was black. Affirmative action is not a very effective technique to select Presidential candidates.

I predict that this stuff will spiral out of control at this point. Obama is a very brittle guy when hit with adversity. His responses on this issue get progressively worse and less credible as each new one contradicts the last one. This stuff is particularly poisonous for Obama, who pretentiously tried to say he was above politics and on some kind of mission from above.

My favorite new stuff on this is linked below.

Randy Mott

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Gotcha, ObamaPlus--Psst! It's Holbrooke either way!
By Mickey Kaus SLATE.COM
Updated Monday, March 17, 2008, at 2:05 PM ET



Obvious Non-Trivial Gotcha: These two Obama statements do not sit easily together!

1. "I don't think my church is actually particularly controversial."

2. "When these statements first came to my attention, it was at the beginning of my presidential campaign. I made it clear at the time that I strongly condemned his comments. But because Rev. Wright was on the verge of retirement, and because of my strong links to the Trinity faith community, where I married my wife and where my daughters were baptized, I did not think it appropriate to leave the church.

Let me repeat what I've said earlier. All of the statements that have been the subject of controversy are ones that I vehemently condemn.

... And while Rev. Wright's statements have pained and angered me .... [E.A.]

If he was so agonized "at the beginning" of his campaign that he was thinking of leaving the church, why did he then reassure people during that campaign that his church wasn't controversial? ... [And is this a "new kind of politics."--ed Yes, that one's always there too!]



"It [Trinity United Church of Christ] also helped give him spiritual bona fides and a new assurance. Services at Trinity were a weekly master class in how to move an audience. When Mr. Obama arrived at Harvard Law School later that year, where he fortified himself with recordings of Mr. Wright’s sermons, he was delivering stirring speeches as a student leader in the classic oratorical style of the black church." New York Times, April 30, 2007:


"Obama's going to have a hard time explaining that I take to be the truth, namely that his relationship with Trinity has been a bit cynical from the beginning. After all, before Obama was a half-black guy running in a mostly white country he was a half-white guy running in a mostly black neighborhood. At that time, associating with a very large, influential, local church with black nationalist overtones was a clear political asset . . . . Since emerging onto a larger stage, it's been the reverse and Obama's consistently sought to distance himself from Wright, disinviting him from his campaign's launch, analogizing him to a crazy uncle who you love but don't listen to, etc." Matthew Yglesias.




Obama big endorsement of Rev. Wright June 2007 video: here.


Obama’s “blow back” – trying to be black in 2004 and using the church and now trying to ditch it:
http://hotair.com/archives/2008/03/16/video-juan-williams-lowers-the-boom-on-obama/