Maybe Arlen Specter will endorse him next (yeah I know, unlikely, but I’m a PA boy and I’ve met the guy, so I wanna like him…)
I’m looking into my crystal ball here…
Anecdote from the ground in Ohio:
In other endorsement news:
The Capital Times of Madison Wisconsin endorsed Barack Obama.
As reported in the Milwaukee Mail Tribune, Sen. Barack Obama has won the backing of the United Food and Commercial Workers, a politically active union with significant membership in the upcoming Democratic battlegrounds.
And it appears that the Service Employees International Union is set to endorse Obama.
New Mexico’s results are finally in, and Clinton narrowly won it, taking the delegates 14-12 (by a margin of less than 2000 votes total).
Curse you, Bill Richardson! :mad: shakes fist
Well of course she won, Bill didn’t go to NM to watch the Superbowl for nothing.
People - big dem movers and shakers - are jumping on Obama because [I believe] they see a man who can unite a party, and perhaps an era. I see Obama being a mover and a shaker someone who is going to do great things in Washington. He’s going to be the president who runs 2 terms and people will wish he could run for a third. Big things happen after big elections - and I believe Obama would not be just a mediocre president, he’s already shifting huge waves of people and endorsements in the nation. Hillary supporters are jumping ver to this side, big mover and shaker dems and pubs are endorsing him, feminist leaders, activists, foreign leaders are looking at Obama as being the change candidate, the candidate who will unite. That I believ is enough to get him the nod, and I believe we’ll see it in just a matter of weeks.
While I’d like to believe this whole-heartedly, once you become president, you face the same things any other president faces. It’s not like they give you a magic wand, and you can change anything you want instantly. I think people are coming over to Obama mostly because of electability. I hope he becomes president, but I kind of agree with Joe Klein’s recent article in Time. He looks at the Obama’s rhetoric:
Look, it’s true that Obama’s speeches don’t contain policy specifics, but hey, that’s working for him. But one shouldn’t make the leap, as Klein does, to claiming that the campaign doesn’t contain policy specifics. It has reams of white papers, and Obama certainly doesn’t shy away from talking policy at the debates. I think there’s a tendency in the media to cast attribute in the campaign as applying to one, and only one, candidate. Obama does rhetoric really well, and Clinton’s strength is in her policy wonkishness. So, ipso facto, Obama has no policy chops, and Clinton’s speeches aren’t any good.
This seems to happen all the time.
My Guy Is Fucking Up - The President isn’t really all that powerful.
The Other Guy Is Fucking Up - See, this is what happens when you have a hippie/pussy/catholic in charge.
Economy is doing well? It’s obviously my guy’s tax cuts from six months ago. Oh, it’s doing poorly? Well, the economy is cyclical, the President doesn’t have that much impact, and anything that’s happening is pretty much the result of whatever was done by his opposite-party predecessor six years ago - you can’t expect something that was done six months ago to have any effect on the economy. It takes time to cycle through.
-Joe
I like his white papers; I’m just addressing why he’s becoming so popular. Like you, however, I don’t really care how he becomes popular. If he becomes elected president, the election will be nothing compared to actually doing the job.
guizot, as far as President goes, it is somewhat true in this case that “the medium is the message.”
Other than the fact that HRC is a bit more of a hawk, she and Obama are really not all that different on matters of policy issues. Neither of them is “content free” (like McLuhan’s fabled light bulb); far from it. Both are very smart critical and analytic thinkers. Yet the message that each them embodies is a night and day difference and the potential effect of that difference is profound.
As has been pointed out in another thread Reagan was a transformational President. Carter was more often right, but that didn’t matter, Carter was a failure as a President anyway. Reagan, wrong as he usually was on so many things, was able to get the American people to follow him anyway. He brought his party back from the Nixon years and into ascendency.
Obama has the potential to do the same but this time with ideas that are right! With him the Democratic party can emerged energized and would grow its Congressional majority. The main tool a President has is the very thing he knows how to use so well - that fabled bully pulpit. And unlike HRC he will have a solid honeymoon period both domestically and on the world stage in which I expect he will be able to use that tool well.
I’l take that potential over not having that potential any time.
Joe Klein was completely full of shit with that article and it represents a new trend of fatuous attacks on Obama which profess to be “creeped out” or “made nervous” by Obama’s popularity. His supporters are called “cultic” and the assertion that people see him as “messianic” is pulled freely from asses as a way to make his movement seem “scary.” Never mind that no one (least of all Obama) has ever actually claimed he’s a messiah.
It’s like commentators have become so cynical that if a candidate is actually inspiring for once, they think there must be something wrong with him.
“Isn’t it dangerous?” they whinge?
No, its not dangerous, you assholes, it’s a breath of fresh air.
It seems to me like there’s a current of resentment underneath that stuff. Like they can’t stand it that there’s a Democratic candidate out there that is inspiring and popular and doesn’t appear to have any negatives, so they have to pretend like his very popularity, and ability to inspire and lack of negatives is somehow sinister and frightening. It’s asinine.
But how he becomes popular may have a big effect on his potential success as President.
Like it or not, a winning candidate has a mandate for those things he’s run on. Particularly if there are costs associated with his agenda, it’s best that he be forthright about that in his speeches, so that those who voted for him have done so while fully aware of those costs, and Congresscritters will know that he’s got a mandate to incur those costs.
Stuff that’s only in white papers doesn’t count.
Agreed. The “messiah” remarks, the “never done wrong”, the “he’s totally pure”, the “he’ll solve all of our ills” remarks are largely strawmen put up by his critics. Yeah, he has some very, ahem, dedicated supporters. So does Clinton. So does McCain.
We now have Texas polls: while Rasmussen has Hillary up 54-38, two other polls taken this week show her lead to be 48-41 or 49-41.
Either way it’s a lifetime away in Campaign Time. Anything can happen in that amount of time. One thing we already know about Obama is his ground forces are strong. I doubt Hillarity wins by huge numbers in any of the last big three. I’m even doubting a trifecta on her part - we’ll see.
Even if Obama can get the lead down to single digits in Texas, that will still be as good as a victory for him. He doesn’t have to win any of those remaing big states outright, just make them close, which I think he will.