Thursday, August 07, 2008

BARACK OBAMA, HORSERACE, JOHN MCCAIN

Is Obama's Slump From McCain's Ads? Or From Overall Barack Fatigue?

Tom Daschle — who hopefully is feeling some sense of relief or justice at the developments in the anthrax case — says McCain's ads mocking Obama are having an effect. I find myself less certain...

I do wonder, however, if we're seeing something Walter Shapiro discusses in Salon today — a sense of Obama fatigue. Obama's speech at the 2004 convention? The best debut of a politician in a generation, we were told (and it probably was). He won his Senate seat, and Newsweek put him on the cover of their 2004 year-end issue as the man of Purple America (for beating Alan Keyes). By 2006 Time was putting him on the cover and explaining "Why Barack Obama Might Be Our Next President." Then he won Iowa, and it was a major breakthrough in American political history. Then he gave his speech on race after the Jeremiah Wright sermons surfaced, and we were told it was the greatest speech on race since Abraham Lincoln. Then he gave his speech in Berlin, and we were told it was the greatest speech by an American overseas in anyone's memory. There's been a lot more advertising in my media market (Washington, D.C.) presumably because of the expectation that Virginia is winnable. Now we're told he's going to give the most amazing convention speech the world has ever seen, a speech so big it needs to be in a football stadium...

It's easy to imagine 51 percent of voters, as the Pew Research Center found, saying, "enough already." We get it. He's the greatest thing since sliced bread. Every speech is the greatest address he's ever given... since the last one.

Sports fans got sick of hearing about What Will Brett Favre Do for a solid month. We're now on several years, with particular intensity in the past few months, about how swell Obama is.  

In light of that, one wonders if the $6 million in McCain advertising and $5 million in Obama advertising during the Olympics is such a great idea... 

08/07 10:22 AMShare