Obama on top

Saturday night was such a big night for Obama; it was the first time I really thought he could win this all. Throughout this process I've been an Obama-skeptic. I was skeptical of his ability to motivate young caucus-goers to turnout. That was proved wrong big-time in Iowa. I was shocked by Iowa, but I wondered whether he wouldn't be a one-hit wonder after Hillary won in NH.

The plan of the Clintons to turn Obama into the black candidate after South Carolina I thought was despicable, but would be effective. It turned out to backfire on them. Obama got 31% of the white vote in New Jersey, 39% in Missouri, 40% in Delaware and Massachusetts, 43% in Georgia, and 48% in Connecticut. This was a lot more than his 25% in South Carolina (albeit in a 3-person race).

Obama has cobbled together a coalition of black voters and upper-class liberals and moderates. The ideological pattern is not as clear as it is in the case of McCain on the Republican side, who attracts moderates and independents. McCain is disliked in his own party because he's not a true-blue conservative. Huckabee has positioned himself as the anti-McCain, but only too late--he lost talk radio in his bloodbath with Romney, and McCain's overwhelming lead in delegates will lead to a nominee the Republican base is none-too excited about. Obama on the other hand has a plain-vanilla liberal voting record, which is brilliant triangulation in my book, because it enables him to run against Hillary on personality. Apparently Hillary showed very little personality in her 60-minutes interview last night. People really don't like her. Obama is the anti-Hillary. But he's also very charismatic himself.

The reason I haven't been impressed by that charisma thus far is that I didn't think sheer charisma could translate into votes when you're relying on a coalition that is smaller and less likely to turn out (black vs. white voters, young vs. older voters, male vs. female voters). But Obama's coalition includes that other element of class--better educated and higher income voters like him. And they are more likely to turn out. That's an angle the media likes to ignore; the reason is, it just sounds bad to talk about Hillary being the candidate of "lower-class voters." They don't want to label her like that. Talk of class is Verboten. This is true beyond presidential politics. We're supposed to be a classless society.

The other reason I haven't been as impressed with Obama up to now is that his entire campaign has one really major substantive difference with Hillary--he opposed the Iraq war and she voted for it, so he offers better judgment compared with her political posturings and hesitations. This has been an effective tool in Obama's arsenal all along. Whenever he's down, he can always bring it up and she doesn't have an answer for it.

I got an email and telephone call from an Obama supporter and reader of this blog making this case yet again. He wrote that Hillary didn't even read the full NIE report on Iraq before casting her vote. The original story on this ran in the Washington Post, and The Hill did some follow-up reporting and concluded the following:

Whether the number of senators who read the document can ever be known is also in dispute. The Washington Post reported in 2004 that only six senators had read the NIE, citing logs that senators were required to sign, but the Intelligence panel now says no such proof exists.

“There is no record, committee or otherwise, of who read the NIE,” said Wendy Morigi, spokeswoman for Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), now Intelligence Committee chairman, who read the NIE before the pivotal fall vote of 2002.

When Rockefeller referred to the half-dozen number during a 2005 Fox News interview, Morigi added, he was citing the Post’s report. Spokeswomen for Intelligence vice chairman Christopher Bond (R-Mo.) and Carl Levin (D-Mich.) also said that the number of senators who read it is unknowable.

But the former senior congressional intelligence staffer, who asked to comment anonymously due to the sensitivity of the subject, said that knowledgeable aides can estimate the approximate number of senators reading the NIE.

"It’s probably pretty hard to say with 100 percent certainty how many read it,” the senior staffer said. “You can say with 100 percent certainty that it’s less than 10.”

The Hill put Clinton in the "Did Not Read/Could Not Recall" category. More than likely she did not read it. But is this so damning? A whole lot of other congressmen and women didn't either.

The answer is yes. The reader says the media has not picked up on this--I disagree. It's widely known that Hillary supported the war and voted for it, and it has hurt her campaign to death. I don't see Obama's candidacy surging without the prop of Hillary's war stance. It's been covered ad nauseum. The reader objects to the lack of coverage of her reading the full NIE, and fudging the issue with her claim that "the best intelligence available said" x, y, and z. Fair enough, but that's the kind of nuances that don't get widespread reportage because they're more difficult for people to understand. The fact remains that Hillary has been damaged greatly by her war vote, and Obama has benefited.