Friday, May 02, 2008

BARACK OBAMA, HILLARY CLINTON, HORSERACE

How the Wright Scandal Is Playing In Indianapolis' Gourmet Dog Biscuit Shop

It's Friday, so a couple of campaign trail anecdotes to start your giggling in time for the weekend...

First, from the Indianapolis Star:

Michael Hemphill, a 25-year-old Purdue University graduate student, is backing Barack Obama for president but won't vote at all if Hillary Rodham Clinton is the Democratic nominee.

Christen Burns, a 31-year-old employee at a Downtown hotel, feels just as strongly that the nominee should be Clinton. And if it's Obama? She expects to vote for Republican John McCain.

It's voters like that — and they're easy to find not only in Indiana but across the nation — that have some Democrats worried that this long primary battle between Obama and Clinton could leave the party divided and defeated this November...

Obama supporters who disapproved of Clinton grew from 35 percent in November to 44 percent this month, while Clinton supporters with an unfavorable view of Obama grew from 26 percent to 42 percent.

Second, from the New York Times, a description of some rather elite-seeming Obama supporters in Indiana (I'm sorry, a gourmet dog biscuit store is almost too perfect) who all insist that they won't be holding Obama's longtime association with Wright against the candidate, but they're worried about all of those people who might:

In the cafes, gift stores and the gourmet dog biscuit shop in this city’s neighborhood of Broad Ripple Village, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.’s name draws all sorts of responses — sighs, rolling eyes, laughter, grim silence.

But many people, like Clyde H. Crockett, a retired law professor who was sipping a drink in a coffee shop here on Thursday, said his thoughts about Mr. Wright would have no bearing on his decision — still unfinished — about whom to vote for in Indiana’s Democratic primary on Tuesday.

“Why should it?” Mr. Crockett said. “No one should be tainted because of Reverend Wright.”

The shoppers in Broad Ripple and in the neighborhoods nearby reflect a demographic group — mostly white, highly educated, professional, artsy, relatively well-off, politically independent — that has leaned toward Senator Barack Obama in other states and one that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton will hope to gain an edge with here, in a state that polls show as almost evenly split.

But in interviews here on Thursday, voters said Mr. Wright’s highly publicized comments and the responses and echoes that have followed had had little bearing on them.

Supporters of both Democratic candidates said that they did not think the Wright episode should change the race but said, again and again, that they feared it might in other, less cosmopolitan areas of Indiana where they thought people might be searching for some acceptable explanation for not voting for a black candidate.

Mr. Crockett, who said he was leaning ever so slightly toward Mr. Obama over Mrs. Clinton, his wife’s preferred candidate, said he worried that Mr. Obama’s ties to his former pastor could harm him among voters in the far southern part of the state, the small towns, the more conservative enclaves.

“I think Reverend Wright will give a lot of people an excuse not to vote for Obama,” Mr. Crockett said. “They’re looking for an excuse, and this will be it.”

And then they will bitterly cling to their guns, their religion, xenophobia and opposition to trade deals...

05/02 11:06 AMShare