NEWSWEEK.COM: How Obama Can Shed the ‘Elitist’ Label (Fineman); The Granny Gap (Alter); The Green Phantom (Thomas)
OBAMA HAS A PUNCTUATION PROBLEM (John F. Harris and David Paul Kuhn, Politico) Barack Obama’s real opponent now is not Hillary Rodham Clinton. It is a pair of punctuation marks. The first is a question. The second is an asterisk. Both threaten to hover over Obama if he wins the Democratic nomination without confronting and defeating the doubts Clinton has raised about his political strength beyond his electoral base of African-Americans and upscale whites. This is the significance of Indiana. Obama can and probably will win the Democratic nomination no matter what happens in the May 6 primary. But a victory in the Hoosier state is critical to Obama gaining at least some of the political and psychic momentum that ordinarily flow to a nomination winner. A loss—on top of a succession of losses in Pennsylvania, Ohio and other big states—would mean the nominee would enter the general election defined to an unusual degree by his vulnerabilities. Could he run strongly in these states in a general election even after running weakly during the nomination phase? That is the question.
AS DEMOCRATS FIGHT, MCCAIN SEEKS THE MIDDLE (Matt Bai, New York Times) Democrats scoff that Mr. McCain is a man running against the moment. He’s pro-war at a time of growing skepticism over Iraq; he’s a free marketeer at a time of heightened worry over the economy; he’s a symbol of America’s past at a time when all anyone can talk about is the technological future. All of this no doubt concerns the McCain team. But he is also a candidate who enjoys, perhaps more than any other Washington politician, a reputation as a reformer who puts country above party, even when his views are unpopular. And while Mr. McCain may have little chance of winning over black voters in Selma or union guys in Youngstown, his stops there are sending a signal to independent voters that he isn’t as doctrinaire as his primary campaign might have suggested and that he intends to run the kind of broad, truly national campaign that Mr. Obama has promised for his party. The truth is that the electorate was never as binary as Karl Rove or MoveOn told us it was. And the bad news for Democrats, as they continue to rip each other on the nightly news, is that, unlike some of his fellow Republicans, John McCain seems to know it.
CHEER UP, DEMOCRATS! (Alan I. Abramowitz, New Republic) According to every known leading indicator, 2008 should be a very good year for Democratic candidates at all levels. There are many factors that point to an across-the-board Democratic victory in November, including the extraordinary unpopularity of President Bush, the deteriorating condition of the economy, the unpopularity of the war in Iraq, and the fact that Americans prefer the Democratic position to the Republican position on almost every major national issue. However, the most important Democratic advantage, and one that has received relatively little attention in the media, is the fact that for the past six years the Democratic electoral base has been expanding while the Republican electoral base has been shrinking.
USING NEW MATH, CLINTON CONTENDS SHE’S AHEAD (John M. Broder, New York Times) The effort is the latest by Mrs. Clinton to capitalize on her nine-point victory in Pennsylvania and convince the 300 uncommitted party leaders that she has a rightful claim to the nomination. Pushing those efforts, she also met privately on Wednesday and Thursday with uncommitted superdelegates at Democratic Party headquarters in Washington, during a rare evening and morning off the campaign trail. In the meetings, Mrs. Clinton, of New York, talked about her victory in Pennsylvania on Tuesday and her political strength among important voter groups, like women and blue-collar workers, whom the Democrats want to hold onto in the general election, her advisers said. She also talked about her fund-raising success over the last few days, after weeks when she was at a disadvantage to her Democratic opponent, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois.
MCCAIN OFFERS TAX POLICIES HE ONCE OPPOSED (Jonathan Weisman, Washington Post) Now that he is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, however, McCain is marching straight down the party line. The economic package he has laid out embraces many of the tax policies he once decried: extending Bush’s tax cuts he voted against, offering investment tax breaks he once believed would have little economic benefit and granting the long-held wishes of tax lobbyists he has often mocked. McCain’s concerns – about budget deficits, unanticipated defense costs, an Iraq war that would be longer and more costly than advertised – have proved eerily prescient, usually a plus for politicians who are quick to say they were right when others were wrong. Yet McCain appears determined to leave such predictions behind. To supporters, McCain has simply seen the light and now understands the power that business tax relief has to spur economic growth and innovation… To critics, it is political pandering.
JUDGMENT AND CHARACTER ARE PARAMOUNT (Stuart Taylor, Jr., National Journal) Many who have been disposed to admire Obama, including me, see these matters as raising troublesome questions about his judgment and character. Many of us have come to wonder whether the purportedly post-ideological Obama is so close to his party’s business-bashing, pacifistic left wing as to skew his judgment on matters ranging from the capital-gains tax to Iraq. Perhaps our suspicions are mistaken. But Obama has hardly laid them to rest. To passionate Obama devotees, however, questions about Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, and the like are “specious and gossipy trivia,” in Shales’s words. They wanted Gibson and Stephanopoulos—who also asked about Iran, Iraq, affirmative action, guns, and taxes (not to mention Hillary Clinton’s fantasies about coming under sniper fire in Bosnia)—to spend the entire time on policy issues. But in Burke’s view, the most important question about any candidate is not his or her canned, soon-to-be-outdated position on this or that policy issue. It is what kind of judgment, character, and values he or she will bring to bear on the many impossible-to-foresee problems that will not be solved by consulting a position paper and issues too subtle to be illuminated by campaign debates.
MCCAIN’S TURNING POINT (Linda Douglass, National Journal) In 1977, Navy Cmdr. John McCain was at a crossroads. He was 40, yet the trajectory of his life was unclear. He had spent five and a half years, the prime of his life, struggling to survive the brutality of a North Vietnamese prison camp. Once home, he underwent long months of painful rehabilitation, hoping to overcome crippling injuries and to return to the skies as a Navy pilot… What came next was an assignment that a warrior such as McCain could have found tedious and, at times, demeaning: The brass sent him to Washington to be the Navy’s liaison to the Senate. McCain describes the post as “the Navy’s lobbyist,” even though, technically, the military is not permitted to lobby… The liaison’s primary responsibility was to manage travel logistics and deal with senators’ military constituents who had problems with pay or pensions. But McCain turned the position into something much more. His three years in the Senate became a turning point that put him on a path toward the White House.
ELECTION 2008: THE AIR WAR (Peter Feld, Portfolio) With a head start in fundraising and organization, Barack Obama outspent Hillary Clinton throughout the Pennsylvania primary battle. And yet, in the final week, strategic use of advertising allowed Clinton to reverse most of her losses, seize a decisive victory, and revive her campaign. Driven by Internet donations, fundraising in 2008 has dwarfed the money hunt in previous campaign cycles and pumped up the campaign industry. So it’s especially strange how, until recently, campaign ads were the dog that didn’t bark. Ads—which are, in theory, the point of all that fundraising—have had little impact for most of this cycle… A big reason for this apparent paradox is the fact that voters this year are more interested in presidential politics than they have been in a long time. Generally, what is referred to as “free media”—news stories on TV and radio, and in newspapers—deliver candidates’ messages to engaged, avid voters, while paid advertising is needed to reach the many others who pay little attention to political news. This year, with more Americans actively following the campaigns, the weight of influence has been tilted toward the news media. It got to cover the intense drama of Obama’s crowds, Hillary’s tears, Bill Clinton meltdowns, and the many debates.
