Mr. Obama has run for the last 18 months as the candidate of hope. Yet party leaders — while enthusiastic about Mr. Obama and his state-by-state campaign operations — say he must do more to convince the many undecided Democrats and independents that he would address their financial anxieties rather than run, by and large, as an agent of change — given that change, they note, is not an issue.Oh, and do I have to point out which former Dem candidate won Ohio and Tennessee, garnering the votes of all of those “hard-working white people”?
“I particularly hope he strengthens his economic message — even Senator Obama can speak more clearly and specifically about the kitchen-table, bread-and-butter issues like high energy costs,” said Gov. Ted Strickland of Ohio. “It’s fine to tell people about hope and change, but you have to have plenty of concrete, pragmatic ideas that bring hope and change to life.”
Or, in the blunter words of Gov. Phil Bredesen, Democrat of Tennessee: “Instead of giving big speeches at big stadiums, he needs to give straight-up 10-word answers to people at Wal-Mart about how he would improve their lives.”
Yes, there are times when I’d like to see Obama show a bit more of a populist mean streak (as I thought Paul Krugman astutely noted here today). However, if you guys are apparently so unsure about him, why don’t you try that Google thingie and navigate to Obama’s web site? As Krugman notes, it's full of good stuff. And it’s not as if there aren’t a million stories already about the guy.
Fortunately, I though David Plouffe of the Obama campaign (a Philly native, by the way), had some good stuff to say here…
“Democrats should take a deep breath and realize that there are a group of voters who won’t make up their mind about a candidate until deep in the fall,” said (Plouffe), Mr. Obama’s campaign manager. “And there are 18 states that are battlegrounds for a reason, and they’ll be decided by 2 to 4 points. I don’t care about national polls.”Uh, New York Times? I have a request: the next time you mention “political attacks on Mr. Kerry’s war service record,” can you please note for the benefit of your readers that those attacks were BASELESS AND UTTERLY DAMNABLE LIES??!!
A New York Times/CBS News poll last month found the race between Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain to be a statistical dead heat, not unlike where Senator John Kerry and Mr. Bush stood in a Times/CBS News poll in July 2004. The poll four years ago was conducted after Mr. Kerry, the Democratic nominee, picked Senator John Edwards as his running mate, yet before both the party conventions and the most intense period of political attacks on Mr. Kerry’s war service record as skipper of a Swift boat in Vietnam.
And as far as unneeded advice goes, Healy gives us this…
…several Democrats said that choosing a seasoned party leader as his running mate would help Mr. Obama in the fall if he is unable to fully allay voters’ uncertainty that a one-term senator is ready for the presidency.I don’t know if Biden would be such a terrible choice – he may be the smartest Dem currently serving in Congress when it comes to foreign policy – but picking Evan Bayh would absolutely kill any kind of online momentum (I go with Bowers here on that - Kaine would be even worse…and based on this prior post, Breaux would be more in his element giving advice to McBush than to Obama).
“The one area he still needs credibility in is experience, and picking an Evan Bayh or a Joe Biden as vice president would help a lot with that,” said John B. Breaux, a former Democratic senator from Louisiana. “It wouldn’t be bad if he came out early and said who his secretary of defense and secretary of state would be — that would address and stabilize the concerns about his experience.”
As far as who I personally want to see on the ticket with Obama, though, I’m sticking with this guy. We’ll see.
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