Aug. 11, 2008
7 Worrisome Signs For Obama
Politico: Democratic Strategists Worry Campaign May Turn McCain's Way
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Play CBS Video
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Poll: Working Class For Obama
A new poll shows Presidential candidate Barak Obama is now leading John McCain among "working class whites." Jeff Greenfield breaks down the numbers.
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Rove's Perspective On Campaign '08
Karl Rove believes that Barack Obama should have a significant advantage over John McCain in the polls. Rove tells Bob Schieffer that Obama's slight lead shows that people have "grave doubts" about him.
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Obama Visits Twin Cities
"CBS News RAW:" Less than a month before the Republican National Convention takes place in St. Paul, Minn., Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama stopped by the Twin Cities for a visit.
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Photo
Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., pauses for a moment while speaking at the National Urban League Annual Conference in Orlando, Fla, Aug. 2, 2008. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
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In-Depth
VP Hot Sheet: Obama
CBSNews.com ranks the top contenders to be Obama's running mate.
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Photo Essay
Barack Obama
A look at the life and meteoric rise of the president-elect.
A few weeks back, Time magazine was musing that John McCain was in danger of sliding from “a long shot” to a “no-shot.” Around the same time, a hard-nosed former Hillary Clinton insider declared the race “effectively over” thanks to the McCain campaign’s ineptitude, the tanking U.S. economy and Barack Obama’s advantages in cash, charisma and hope. And Obama, up by three to six points nationally, was about to leverage a much-anticipated trip to Iraq, Afghanistan and Europe into a pre-convention poll surge.
Instead, his supporters are now suffering a pre-Denver panic attack, watching as John McCain draws incrementally closer in state and national polls - with Rasmussen’s most recent daily national tracker showing a statistical dead heat.
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton has been privately enumerating her doubts about Obama to supporters, according to people who have spoken with her. Clinton’s pollster Mark Penn recently unveiled a PowerPoint presentation red-flagging Obama’s lukewarm leads among white female voters and Hispanics - while predicting a five-point swing could turn a presumed Obama win into a McCain landslide.
“It’s not that people think McCain will win - it’s that they are realizing that McCain could win,” says Quinnipiac University pollster Peter Brown, whose surveys show tight races in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. “This election is about Barack Obama - not John McCain - it's about whether Barack Obama passes muster. Every poll shows that people want a Democratic president, the problem is they’re not sure they want Barack Obama.”
Obama’s aides point to the stability of his small national lead, say they aren’t worried about his summer stall and think his numbers will improve when voters begin tuning in to the conventions.
“This is a country that is looking for a fundamentally different direction and John McCain offers nothing but the status quo,” said spokesman Bill Burton, adding that he wasn’t “losing any sleep” over his boss’s rough patch.
The campaign’s confidence may turn out to be justified but two weeks prior to the national convention there are more than a few worrisome signs for Obama. Here are seven:
1. Race. “The idea that Obama was going to win in a blowout was always preposterous,” says former Nebraska senator and onetime presidential hopeful Bob Kerrey, an Obama backer. “A big piece of this, of course, is whether white people are going to support a black guy… If [Obama] is a tall, skinny white guy named Paul Jones it's a different story.”
Obama is running nearly neck-and-neck with McCain among white voters in most polls, a major cause for optimism considering that John Kerry and Al Gore lost the white vote by 17 and 12 points respectively. Among whites, he does well with women, the affluent and college grads but fares poorly among low-income earners and Catholics - key swing groups that handed Hillary Clinton stunning blowouts in West Virginia and Kentucky.
How much does his race factor into tightening contests in Missouri, Wisconsin, Florida, Minnesota and Ohio? Nobody knows - and that’s the problem.
A huge challenge for Obama, insiders say, is simply determining how much skin color will matter in November. Race is nearly impossible to poll - no one ever says “I’m a racist” - and no campaign wants it revealed they are even asking questions on the issue.
“It’s the uncertainty that kills me - we know it’s going to be factor, but how big a factor?” asks a Democratic operative with ties to the Obama camp. “How do you even measure such a thing?
Adding to the jitters: GOP surrogates like New York Rep. Pete King have vowed to make Obama’s relationship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright a enterpiece during the homestretch.
2. Obama’s strength in Virginia may be overhyped. His chances of ending the Democrats 44-year losing streak in the commonwealth are pretty good - thanks to the explosive growth of the liberal D.C. suburbs, and a 147,000 spike in voter registration sure to benefit Democrats. But Obama’s aides privately concede his odds in Virginia are probably no better than 50-50 and that the state is far from a lock-solid hedge if he loses Ohio and Florida.
3. Michigan’s in play for McCain. In the year of the downturn, the hard-hit upper Midwest should be prime Obama country. Instead it’s a potential minefield. Obama is still ahead by two to five points here - similar to margins of victory enjoyed by Gore and Kerry in the last two presidential contests- but McCain has quietly crept up over the past month and could vault ahead if he anoints ex-Gov. Mitt Romney. Simmering tensions between predominantly-black Detroit and its white suburbs could hurt Obama. And McCain’s surrogates were handed a gift in the jailing of Obama supporter Kwame Kilpatrick, Detroit’s mayor.
“Watch Michigan -- the Democrats think they've got it but they don't,” says Quinnipiac’s Peter Brown, a longtime Michigan observer. “Obama should be killing [McCain] there, but there's a lot more racial tension in Michigan than in other states.”
Obama also hasn’t pulled away in other Democrat-friendly neighboring states, watching leads in Wisconsin and Minnesota erode over the last month.
4. Bad times could be good for McCain. If anger helps Democrats, fear advantages Republicans. A growing number of Democratic strategists worry that some swing state voters may opt for McCain if the economy veers from merely awful to downright terrifying. The typical political calculus - that bad economic times will deliver the White House to Democrats - may not hold if people start viewing the downturn as, essentially, a national security crisis that can’t be entrusted to a novice. And that was McCain’s underlying message in his Paris Hilton ad: Bank failures, soaring gas prices and plummeting house values are forms of economic terrorism and he’s an all-purpose anti-terror warrior.
“John McCain is a known quantity,” says Bob Kerrey, who thinks Obama will ultimately prevail. “You don't look at John and say, ‘Who the heck is he?’ he's a veteran, he's a guy who got pretty banged up in Vietnam. He can deal with crisis. There's some uncertainty about Senator Obama.”
The good news for Obama, of course, is that McCain - who infamously admitted he “never understood” economics - is loathed by unions, was somnambulant at the dawn of the housing meltdown and still gropes for a coherent economic policy that doesn’t include the words “offshore drilling.” But he doesn’t have to win the argument, just reinforce doubts about Obama with wavering swing state voters. The Illinois senator still enjoys a major edge on the economic issues, but his 20-point June lead on the who-can-best-fix-the-economy question slipped to a 17-point edge in July, according to the Pew Research Center.
“Obama wins on the economy,” said Guy Cecil, Hillary Clinton’s field director during the primaries. “But it will be interesting to see if McCain’s able to close the economic gap.”
5. Where have you gone, Ross Perot? Bill Clinton, the lone two-term Democratic president since FDR, wouldn’t have been elected if independent Ross Perot hadn’t siphoned 19 percent of the vote in 1992. Former Georgia Rep. Bob Barr, staging an indie bid from McCain’s right, has little cash and doesn’t seem to be a factor in competitive states.
6. The Legacy of LBJ, Jimmy and Bubba. Barack Obama would have been a trailblazer no matter what - but the Deocrats’ trail to the White House has been remarkably narrow since 1960, accommodating only southern whites with border-state strength: Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. (Add Al Gore if you’re counting the popular vote.)
7. Americans may want divided government. Some Democratic operatives think a possible landslide for their party in congressional races could backfire on Obama.
“Fairly or not, folks think he’s pretty liberal and nobody wants a pair of Pelosi’s running things,” says a New York-based Democratic consultant.
Adds Bob Kerrey: “The country's still pretty divided… people may want a divided government. They want change but I'm not sure that the Democratic agenda has the support of a majority of Americans.”
By Glenn Thrush
Copyright 2008 POLITICO





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See all 1474 CommentsThe answer is: basically nothing
Yup - Dems woulda done better to nominate
DUH!!!!!!!
Dems woulda done better nominating....
It''s not. It''s not even CLOSE. Right now Obama is averaging about 106 electoral votes ahead of fossil John. And this is August!
Barring some unforseen circumstance, this election will be a landslide victory for Obama and the democratic party.
What a joke!
Known for his fervent support of the Mexican trucking industry.
Could our courageous press bother to look into just what McCain has done and stood for in his 20+ years in Congress--or are they too busy informing us about Paris Hilton?
Could we have an analysis of how McCain has flip-flopped on so many issue?--or is Brittany Spears of more interest to the advertisers who decide what we learn through the MSM?
Can we hear more about how McCain cheated on his long-suffering war wife, just to marry a moneybags who bought him his Senate seat--or is Edwards affair ever so much more titillating?
Guess which.
Vote for Obama and you''ll see what utter disaster really means.
Think the flu feels bad? Try cancer.
McBlame has a great chance of winning and then croaking of old age so the Neocons who select his VP can rest assured their vision of a New Oiled Order can continue.
Dumb Dems and their lack of foresight is an obimination.
The rep party is going to have to rebuild its image from the ground up. Put Reagan to rest, eliminate or tonedown the neocon/Israeli influence, and come up with a vision that applies to the American of today.
The American of today has gone through some radical changes in the last 20 years and the rep party has not changed along with it. It is still the party of your grandfather.
Look who they nominated as their candidate, for christsake! Some wrinkly, old geezer who still lives in the past.
That is the best they can offer the country??
reps will be out of power for at least 12 years and maybe longer.
But, but, but fstop100 - he has all that community coordinator background.
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
Isn''t that second to the county dog catcher as far as leadership is concerned ?
Dems woulda done better nominating...
Yeah Baby, yeah!!!!
John McCain quotes pre-Iraq War and during Iraq War:
"Because I know that as successful as I believe we will be, and I believe that the success will be fairly easy, we will still lose some American young men or women." [CNN, 9/24/02]
"We%u2019re not going to get into house-to-house fighting in Baghdad. We may have to take out buildings, but we%u2019re not going to have a bloodletting of trading American bodies for Iraqi bodies." [CNN, 9/29/02]
"But the point is that, one, we will win this conflict. We will win it easily." [MSNBC, 1/22/03]
"But I believe, Katie, that the Iraqi people will greet us as liberators." [NBC, 3/20/03]
"It%u2019s clear that the end is very much in sight." [ABC, 4/9/03]
"There%u2019s not a history of clashes that are violent between Sunnis and Shiahs. So I think they can probably get along." [MSNBC, 4/23/03]
"This is a mission accomplished. They know how much influence Saddam Hussein had on the Iraqi people, how much more difficult it made to get their cooperation." [This Week, ABC, 12/14/03]
"I%u2019m confident we%u2019re on the right course." [ABC News, 3/7/04]
Posted by Smirk5 at 08:20 AM : Aug 11, 2008
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What a surprise. The Dukakis-Kennedy-Kerry wing of the Dem party are now having gleeful doubts about how they forced Obama down our throats and rigged the caucus states so he could win. Couple this with the Repervican strategy of having large numbers of Reperves encouraged by Limbuagh and other pundants to vote against Hillary in the primaries and you have the losing strategy gobbled up by stupid Dems. Sure, Obama is an excellent speaker, but that assumes that the American people want to be spoken to or that they even listen. Both assumptions are as arrogant as an arugla eating lib (or arugula eating neocon for that matter).
Why would Americans vote for a third term of Bush''s failed policies?
If America picks ANOTHER leader based on their own ignorance, we deserve to fall just as hard as every other great power. I love AMerica, but its citizens have been dumbed down for decades, and they all vote Republcian because they believe all the lies beat inot their heads year after year, even though any effort on the part of their lazy ***** to seek the facts would show that Republcan RAISE taxes, are fiscally irresponsible, and don''t give a *** about POOR WHITE TRAHS that votes for them.
Reagan buried Carter. McCain will be DESTROYED during the debates.
Posted by commonsence1
And then there was Carter/Reagan where it was persistently close until the final week when voters broke for the newcomer. At a time when we are greeted with headlines such as "housing sales lowest in 15 years", we may indeed be replaying history.
Number 1. Extreme pain in left arm.
Number 2. My mini-me becoming a maxi-me
Number 3. C''mon........somebody help me out here
McCain is Carter.
Just wait until the debates and it will be as clear as day.
But these are just perceptions. The media and analysts would like us to think that the americans are so shallow that they are not prepared to fight for the kind of life they want to live and therefore vote in someone who can give them that life.
I may think that a white person from the slave/Klu Klux/pre-60''s era might think this way, but I highly doubt any thinking person after this era would have this backward mentality.
Posted by davein80501 at 10:34 AM : Aug 11, 2008
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That would be "nukular", stupid lib.
Both political parties have failed to identify and feel the pulse of Americans.
This nation in its current state is in shambles.
Barrack is a shot in the dark... Hilary is a snake in the grass... and finally MCain is whatever he needs to be to please those he wants to vote for him; classical politician, no real commitment, no real vision, no backbone, an aligator waiting for the right moment to jump into the water for a easy prey.
Does anyone possibly think that the Mc Cain camp is worried about the campaign turning Obama''s way. What is this article about?
This article is about making a story.
McCain is a dangerous man whose need to wage war will involve us in a war that we cannot win and that will create a loss for all. You think the casualties of 9/11 and Iraq were bad, what about the loss of millions of live if Russia decides to call McCain and his crew on their bluff?
By the way, when did McCain assume the role of President and decide that it was his job to lash out at Russia and threaten military action?
The guy is a hothead. Beware.
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Posted by davein80501 at 10:35 AM : Aug 11, 2008
I''ve been saying this for some time now; McCain is a loose canon on deck. His temper could well cause us to start WWIII. I don''t think he would hesitate to go nuclear at all, probably take a New York nanosecond. Anyone but McCain in "08".
Posted by Territc2000 at 10:34 AM : Aug 11, 2008
I think that it''s more about who the candidate is than his skin color. I would vote for Colin Powell (who is black-not mixed), but Barack, nor McCain for that matter, impress me.
That''s a legend with no basis in fact because Perot pulled evenly from D and R leaning voters
Granted these are traits they should posses as Presidents of this nation. However, more profound traits are alltogether discarded or overlooked, such as: character, integrity, truthfulness, dedication to our national wellbeing and moral character.
He who leads a people should be an example of the peoples beliefs and character.
If these two candidates are the model of our people then we are in trouble indeed.
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Posted by cbk16 at 10:42 AM : Aug 11, 2008
Only if the congress has a veto-proof majority. A great example are the past 2 years. The democrats couldn''t get a dam thing through due to Bush''s threat of a veto.
www.bobbarr2008.com/rights
Obama is not worried about race. The writer, Glen Thrush, is worried about race.
Obama is not worried about Virginia. Virginia is worried about Virginia. Florida is worried about Florida. Ohio is worried about Ohio.
Michigan is like any other state that changes political definition with the next passing media advertisement. Those poor residents of Michigan are sick of the bad media they get....just like many other people in many other places.
I will assail the writer, Glenn Thrush for "Pigeon Holing" people of this nation with his scripted theme of alarmist political adds.
It is as if Mr Thrush and other writers have a script that they pulled out from an perevious election, and then re-tread it with new casting.
Mr. Thrush obviously doesn''t know Barack Obama, or what is happening inside his mind.
CBS News is showing desparation and falling to lower standards.
Anyone seen old man McCain''s blankie? Smirk.
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Posted by concorde5 at 10:43 AM : Aug 11, 2008
Trust me concord, it has moved a great deal. An Obama candidacy would not have been possible in the 60''s, I agree we''ve got a long way to go, but the jouney is about half over. Maybe by 2030 we''ll arrive.
Hillary Clinton needs to gracefully move on if she is not chosen as V.P. ...........too much is at stake.
Mc Cain by his own words voted "with the President(Bush)" 90% of the time. Our country needs a break from tax breaks to wealthy people and corporations. Money needs to flow into the pockets of the people again.
Mc Cain wants to build 45 nuclear power plants. The people will have to pay with rate increases for these plants which cost about $5,000,000,000 each or $250,000,000,000 in total before cost over-runs.
Public Utilities fund new plants with bond issues , they have to raise rates to pay for the debt due on the bonds. You can also bet there will be construction delays and cost over-runs.
-------------------------- Posted by CBS4me3 at 10:46 AM : Aug 11, 2008
I suspect if Obama were white you would support him. You must be from the hills of Kentucky or West Virginia?
Why, also, is a political column being "presented" by ExxonMobil?
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Posted by jydavis1
That is one Juvenile post! you''re not really well informed are you?
I''m sick of the race card issue popping up as THE reason that some white people may not vote for Obama. I''m not voting for him and it isn''t because he is black. It is because I do NOT support the Democratic Party Platform, and I wouldn''t vote for a Democrat no matter who they get to fill the Pres. nominee slot.
Aside from that, if I was looking to vote for a Democrat, I wouldn''t want someone with no experience in foreign policy, I wouldn''t want someone who had spent 20 years hanging around with known terrorists, and in a church where the Preacher was braying on and on about his hatred for white America.
The Democrats should have gone with Hillary as the front runner, and Obama as the Vice Presidential pick. Well, it is too late now. It will be interesting to see how this all turns out.
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