Entries for February 2008

I called it the Phenom. Now they're calling it the Swoon. The media Obama Swoon, that is. This morning, there's a front-page New York Times story about the hurdles media outlets will now start placing in Barack Obama's path as he becomes the front-runner and, at this point, likely Democratic presidential nominee.

Early this month, I blogged about the Phenom and its predictable end, referring to the National Journal's rating of Obama as the most liberal member of the Senate and Hillary Clinton's rating as 14th-most liberal.

A 20-something journalism buddy said "everyone" she knows is watching an online version of a Saturday Night Live skit from last weekend in which writer-comedian Tina Fey hosts a segment called "women's news." In it, she pokes fun at women who've "come so far as feminists they feel they don't need to vote for a woman" and instead blindly follow whatever Oprah Winfrey tells them to do.

The sketch is clearly meant to support Hillary Clinton's beleaguered campaign and is pretty effective in so doing. She chides voters who don't like the idea that the Clintons have run as sort of a team.

It was Nation of Islam Leader Louis Farrakhan's first major address since facing down cancer.

It was in Barack Obama's backyard—his hometown of Chicago. Farrakhan, perhaps the nation's most potent symbol of antisemitism, told a Chicago crowd of 20,000 that Obama is America's next savior.

"This young man is the hope of the entire world that America will change and be made better.... This young man is capturing audiences of black and brown and red and yellow. If you look at Barack Obama's audiences and look at the effect of his words, those people are being transformed."

Barack Obama's claim at the Austin debate with Hillary Clinton last night that accusations of plagiarism against him are "silly" and invoke images of politics' "silly season" are disingenuous at best and slick at worst.

All one has to do is watch the YouTube comparisons of Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick's delivery of his speech in October 2006 with the same lines delivered (less well, I might add) by Obama this month, and it becomes clear that the lines were taken directly.

With the Wisconsin and Hawaii losses behind Hillary Clinton, her allies have set up a political committee to run ads in Ohio, Texas, and Pennsylvania specifically to help her standing.

First reported this morning by a blogger at the Atlantic magazine's website, the committee was later identified as the "American Leadership Project" by another blogger at ABC News.

The chattering class inside the beltway is in fairly solid agreement that Hillary Clinton's race is all but over. Yet a poll taken in Ohio earlier this week showed her way ahead of Barack Obama. Ohio and Texas are among the big states she must win to stay competitive in the delegate race. But the Ohio poll was taken before this week's Potomac primaries, when even her campaign was stunned by many of her core constituents (white older women and blue-collar workers) deserting her in Maryland and Virginia. And while she tied in Ohio with Obama among white men, white women were holding on fast to her coattails.

Clinton's lead comes entirely from women, where she leads by 29 points. She and Obama are tied among men. Whites vote 3:2 Clinton. Blacks vote 3:1 Obama.

As white women in Ohio watched Obama's victories on Super Tuesday, the conventional wisdom goes that they may have decided it's time to switch camps, too. Obama is just becoming well known, and people are more likely to switch from a well-known politician whose campaign appears to be failing (Clinton) to a lesser-known who has the big "mo" behind him. But members of the chattering class have been wrong time and again in this surprising election year, and it's possible they will be wrong once more about upcoming big state primaries.

It's Obama's to lose now. The race is as good as over. The Obama Phenom is gaining velocity and surge.

Barack Obama will get his comeuppance from the media—the kind of sorting-through-each-pebble raking that all front-runners endure. But he'll get it after he passes the magic number of 2,025, which allows him to slip his finger through the Democratic gold ring—the nomination—for winning the majority of delegates. His raking will come too late to benefit Hillary Clinton.