Media backlash and Clinton attacks hurting Obama?
March 19th, 2008Perhaps its the media’s week-long video barrage of angry sermon clips or Hillary’s attacks on Obama or the bogus NAFTA story or all of the above but the result is Obama’s first substantial drops in poll numbers since Super Tuesday.
Obama – who has polled better than Clinton nationally against McCain – is now losing to McCain in Ohio, Missouri and Kentucky according to new polls out today.
Again, polls have proven to be useless this year but there’s a definite trend starting to show.
These kinds of poll numbers back up Clinton’s claims to electability in key states. In real terms, these polls mean nothing this far out from the general election and in states where primaries have already been held (and where Obama won Missouri) BUT they give Clinton the ammo she needs to turn Super Delegates against Obama – or at least slow and maybe stop the mass migration of Super Delegates to Obama.
I still don’t believe the Pastor Wright clips alone could have this kind of effect on Obama’s numbers and I would not be surprised to find that the Clinton camp is still negative-campaigning against Obama in key states like those mentioned in an effort to drive up his negatives and create the argument that she is more electable.
As TalkingPointsMemo points out, these polls were taken before Obama’s speech on race in Philadelphia yesterday and while the media was in full bash-Obama mode.
Josh Marshall of TPM looks at the significance of the numbers here:
Just looking over the recent poll soundings, I’m curious what the next two weeks are going to show on a few fronts. The Zogby poll may be an outlier today. But there does seem to be some real evidence now that something is allowing John McCain to draw even with the Democratic candidates in hypothetical national match ups and that Clinton is moving ahead against Obama in nationwide matchups between the two of them.
On top of this there’s a poll out of North Carolina showing a neck and neck race between Obama and Clinton, a state that has been expected to be a strong one for Obama.
– Steve
Stumble it!
March 19th, 2008 at 9:17 pm
Well, what you’re seeing is that the MSMedia has discovered he’s a serious candidate and is having to do their job now. The issue with his pastor is *not* new information; I saw blog posts about this back before the first primary. The information about his relationship with Rezko, again, is not new information. And if you depended on the MSMedia alone, you probably wouldn’t know he’s half-white.
But the MSMedia (which you accurately depicted as blind & sleeping) is just now doing its self-described job. What took so long? I call it the Bridesmaid Effect myself; you saw this with McCain on the Republican side in 2000, and Bill Bradley on the Democratic side the same year. Essentially you *knew* the other guy was going to win so they treated the ‘bridesmaid’ much gentler than they would have if said ‘bridesmad’ were a serious candidate. In McCain’s case they could get away with describing him as a maverick outsider without bringing up his involvement with the Savings & Loan scandals.