After the previous post, I spent some time watching replay of the Obama segment, and spent some time on the phone with a pal who was unnerved by McCain's answers and outraged that the forum was held before such a friendly audience. I think, however, that the vent has to be, for Obama, a net positive, for the following reasons.
Obama was thoughtful and gave mostly clear, concise, answers. As congregants at Saddleback told Salon's Mike Madden yesterday, they came away having seen an authentic man, a principled man, a man that was worthy of respect and their attention, even if they weren't going to vote for him in the fall (after all, as one pointed out, they are the people who make $250k or more, and don't think they are wealthy, as they still "struggle" to keep all that they have acquired).
The Saddleback congregation wasn' the only audience, though. And if middle-of-the-road voters across the nation got to experience that same authenticity and thoughtfulness, how can that be a negative? In a campaign season where the biggest themes running against Obama seem to be his "elitism", his not really being"like us", the "who is he and why should we trust him?" theme, how can it be bad for him to have an extended open conversation in such a sensational forum?
There are segments of the voting population who will vote for John McCain no matter what happens: they are hard-line "pro-lifers", or reflexive anti-taxers, or so deeply partisan that John McCain could spend the rest of campaign season in a bunny suit handing out peeps and singing camp songs and he wouldn't lose their vote because he's a republican.
There are still the Tony Perkins and James Dobsons of the world, and their email lists of people like my mom who will always vote for whomever they label "conservative" enough in their version of "Judeo-Christian values". There are the audiences of Jerome Corsi and Rush Limbaugh and Mchael Savage and others who will absorb every lie they hear and presume that they now know everything there is to know about the Senator form Illinois.
And there are people who are either still devoted to President Bush, or completely in love with McCain's prisoner of war stories.
Obama will never, not in a million years, get a vote from these people.
But any chance he gets to reveal himself in an extended, authentic way before a national audience, any time he can spend which is not devoted to answering smears and misrepresentations, is a net positive. Because he's that good, that smart, that real.
Aside: memo to the McCain camp on the "Cone of Silence" :
It's not so much that anyone would question the honesty of "A John McCain, a former prisoner of war", it's that we question the deviousness and history of cheats and low blows by his campaign staff.
In other words, don't ask us to trust the integrity of the candidate when we know the campaign is run by Karl Rove and his accolytes.
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