ARG has Obama down 20 points, a number which serious observers seem to put almost no stock in beyond the fact that it would indicate a shift in momentum. Obama had been gaining in Pennsylvania for weeks, and all of a sudden a poll shows things moving in the other direction in a big way. The race is still probably very tight there, but Survey USA, which tends to be far more reliable than ARG, has Clinton gaining seven points in Indiana in just the last two weeks. According to their survey she's now up 16 points that state. A... lire la suite
Lien du post: http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2008/04/a_bad_week_for_obama.asp
There’s really only one topic in the zeitgeist this week: Barack Obama.
· Matt Drudge threw Hillary Clinton under the blogs. Barack Obama is your new man now, dog. There will be stickers.
That report follows by 5 days this report by Paul Steinhauser, CNN Deputy Political Director: “MANCHESTER, New Hampshire (CNN) — On the eve of the New Hampshire primary, Sen. Barack Obama has a nine-point lead over Sen. Hillary Clinton in the state, according to a CNN-WMUR poll out Monday. This entry was posted on Saturday, January 12th, 2008 at 6:40 am and is filed under 2008 presidential race, Obama. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
STORY OF THE WEEK: John McCain wins Florida and looks to win the Republican nomination. If it is McCain, Ann Coulter said not only will she vote for Hillary, not only will she campaign for Hillary, but she will have Hillary's baby. Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity smiled at the ratings this will deliver them during the February sweeps. GROUNDHOG'S DAY OF THE WEEK: If Hillary sees her shadow, 6 more weeks of campaigning. GLOBAL WARMING OF THE WEEK: China has its worse winter storm in 50 years. Al Gore issued a statement: “I swear, as God is my witness, I am not now nor have I ever been to China.” WEST VIRGINIA STORY OF THE WEEK: Our wonderful TSA agents stopped Mayor Danny Jones from intranational travel because his papers weren’t in order. He could not get on an airplane back home because his driver’s license expired. Jones saved himself by producing a magazine article that proved he is mayor of Charleston. Just why anyone would make up being mayor of Charleston is beyond me. Now we know what TSA stands for: Tough Ship, America. KOOL AID FLAVOR OF THE WEEK: Obama. Tastes great. No filling. This week's sippers include Ted Kennedy and MoveOn.org. Hillary plans to counterattack with tears — and her Vast Flying Monkeys Conspiracy. PRESS RELEASE OF THE WEEK: NOW's New York chapter denounced Kennedy for betraying women by not endorsing Hillary. No mention of Mary Jo Kopechne was in the release.
Nine in a row. Every primary and caucus since Super Tuesday 2 weeks ago. The Barack Obama campaign juggernaut rolled into frigid Wisconsin and emerged with another double digit win under its belt, leaving Hillary Clinton to ponder the question of what she can possibly do to slow down Obama’s momentum and get back in the race. In those two weeks, Obama has won contests in every region of the country. More importantly, he has been slowly whittling away at Hillary Clinton’s support among her core demographic groups until we see today that Clinton’s big lead two weeks ago among women, Hispanics, middle class, and self-identified Democratic voters has disappeared and Obama has either caught or surpassed her in support among those groups.
Days after Senator Barack Obama became embroiled in a controversy involving comments made by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., his longtime church pastor, Mr. Obama will give a “major address” on race and politics today in Philadelphia. He’s expected to begin at 10:15 a.m. Jodi Kantor and Jeff Zeleny of The New York Times write that Senator Obama, who was still writing the speech on Monday night, believes it “could be one of the most important of his presidential candidacy.” Mr. Obama said Monday that in his speech, to be given at the National Constitution Center, he would “talk a little bit about how some of these issues are perceived from within the black church community, for example, which I think views this very differently.” After removing Mr. Wright from a religious advisory committee on his campaign on Friday, Mr. Obama concluded over the weekend that he had not sufficiently explained his association with the pastor. He told several aides he was worried that if voters did not hear directly from him — in the setting of a major speech — doubts and questions about him might grow. Mike Dorning of The Chicago Tribune writes that Mr. Obama is uncharacteristically addressing racial issues because he's created an image of himself as the politician “who can move beyond America’s racial divisions, and the controversy over Wright has challenged that image.” Obama has been struggling to deal with the comments of Rev. Jeremiah Wright for several days, since videotaped sermons surfaced in which Wright said, among other things, that African-Americans should sing “God Damn America” instead of “God Bless America.” Obama pointedly ended a speech at a community college in western Pennsylvania Monday morning with the words “God Bless America”—an uncharacteristic closing for him. By the way, Bill Clinton said in a recent CNN interview that his remarks back in January comparing Mr. Obama with Rev. Jesse Jackson weren't meant to be racist. Interpreting them as such is “a total myth and a mugging,” the former president said. The Obama speech puts race back in the media spotlight after a day focused on Iraq and Wall Street. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, spent Monday in Baghdad with other members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Adam Nagourney of The Times reports that Mrs. Clinton criticized Mr. McCain for insisting American troops continue their work in Iraq. She also went after Mr. Obama for what she called inconsistencies between what he and his advisers say about his Iraq policy. And Mr. Obama, Democrat of Illinois, eagerly engaged Mrs. Clinton for challenging the depth of his opposition to the war. He talked again of having spoken out against it from the outset, a distinction that has served him well in the primaries. Mr. Obama has been parrying criticism from both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. McCain, who, though offering starkly different views of what should be done in Iraq, have similarly questioned his credentials to be commander in chief. During the question-and-answer session following Mrs. Clinton's speech, reporters mostly grilled her about the credit and housing crisis that had Wall Street in a panic on Monday morning. Both she and Mr. Obama, from a rally in Pennsylvania, criticized the Bush administration for not doing enough to prevent the mess. The housing crisis has been the subject of a simmering dispute between Clinton and Obama for weeks. Obama has criticized Clinton’s proposal to freeze foreclosures for 90 days and subprime mortgage rates for five years, saying her plan would send interest rates for new and refinanced mortgages skyrocketing. But to the surprise of many Democratic campaign strategists, neither candidate has consistently sustained a focus on the economy — despite a barrage of polling data showing it has vaulted over the Iraq war in the past four months as the most pressing concern of voters. Last Thursday, both Obama and Clinton were on Capitol Hill when Dodd and Frank unveiled their legislation that would expand the government’s intervention in the crumbling housing market. Neither of them showed up at the news conference, nor have they come forward with new proposals since the contagion in the mortgage market spread to Wall Street. Republican state Sen. Cameron Brown, R-Sturgis, issued a statement calling it a ‘’waste of time, money and more than half a million votes.'’ And one of the Michigan leaders of the Obama campaign, state Sen. Tupac Hunter, D-Detroit, said the idea was developed haphazardly, resulting in a plan that leaves unanswered serious questions about the financing and administration of a second election. Mrs. Clinton, of New York, has agreed to the plan; aides to Mr. Obama, of Illinois, have refused to commit to it. It is more uncertain than ever that he will: The party's rules may disqualify anyone who voted in Michigan's Republican primary from voting in the Democratic primary — including those who may be Obama supporters who voted Republican because his name was not on the Democratic ballot. * Barack Obama gives a speech on race and politics in Philadelphia, where he will be joined by his wife, Michelle.
Further, as Goldfarb pointed out last week, Obama also seems to be considering the maintenance of 60,000-80,000 troops in Iraq for the indefinite future. By that standard, doesn't Obama meet Schultz's definition of a warmonger?
While Newsweek has certainly produced some penetrating reportage and incisive analysis, the opposite has more often been true in this presidential race, as Jim Geraghty reminds us. Newsweek's latest pro-Obama work is this hit job on Joe Lieberman. The writers report that during a confrontation between Obama and Lieberman on the floor of the Senate last week, "Obama told Lieberman he was surprised by Lieberman's personal attacks and his half-hearted denials of the false rumors that Obama is a Muslim." This claim was sourced to an anonymous Obama aide, and as Mark Hemingway reports, Newsweek never contacted Lieberman's office for a response to this accusation: Lieberman spokesman Marshall Wittmann says, “The anonymous Obama campaign staffer's characterization of the private conversation was entirely false and fabricated.” Another Lieberman aide confirmed, “I was not told that the Obama campaign was selectively leaking the contents of that conversation, or I would have made it clear that that characterization was completely and utterly false. The first time I knew what the Obama campaign was saying was when I saw it in a magazine.” That Newsweek did not ask Lieberman to respond to the specific charges is grossly unfair. Newsweek never cites an example of Lieberman's "half-hearted denials" of the "Obama's a Muslim" rumor. And what makes the story all the more infuriating is that it seems, at least to me, that Obama's confrontation with Lieberman was a perfect example of the Clintonian triangulation he's supposed to be above. After pivoting away from his dovish positions on Iran in a speech to AIPAC, Obama then walks onto the floor of the Senate and tells that uppity senator Joe Lieberman to shut up--a not-so-subtle appeal to the Kossack Left.
As a refresher, here is part of Thursday’s Associated Press report on this particular item in the ongoing Obama Flip-Flop festival, first noted at NewsBusters by John Stephenson: Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama says “mental distress” should not qualify as a health exception for late term-abortions, a key distinction not embraced by many supporters of abortion rights. In an interview this week with “Relevant,” a Christian magazine, Obama said prohibitions on late-term abortions must contain “a strict, well defined exception for the health of the mother.” Obama then added: “Now, I don't think that ‘mental distress' qualifies as the health of the mother. I think it has to be a serious physical issue that arises in pregnancy, where there are real, significant problems to the mother carrying that child to term.” Women today don’t have to show they are suffering from a “serious clinical mental health disease” or “mental illness” before getting an abortion post-viability, as Obama now says is appropriate. So Obama, it seems to me, still is backing away from what the law says—and backing away from a proposed federal law (of which he is a co-sponsor) that envisions a much broader definition of mental health than the one he laid out this week. Oh, there is one item referring to Obama’s new as-of-this-moment position. It doesn’t come up in the “Obama abortion” search results themselves, but is instead a Times blog reference that appears to the right of those results (”Rove Hits Obama on Abortion Issue“; item above Rove link at the search results page is from October 2007). In that post at the Times’s “The Caucus” blog, Michael Falcone waits until the eighth paragraph to mention Obama’s switcheroo.