In the wake of the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, the press has predictably focused on all the doubts voters have about Hillary Clinton. That's the way the game is played: The press builds you up as a front-runner and then tears you down.
But what's been virtually ignored about the poll is that Barack Obama is displaying some rather stunning liabilities of his own. You can bet that the Clinton and Edwards campaigns have noticed.
Specifically, according to the Journal, just 30% of Americans rate Obama positively on having enough experience for the presidency and just 29% rate him positively on "being a good commander in chief."
In an age of terrorism, that's not good.
Undoubtedly Obama can bring those numbers up as he becomes better known. But so far he's made a key tactical mistake. Obama is often compared to a young JFK but JFK was a veteran and a war hero. More important, he ran at his rivals from the right, particularly on foreign policy. Kennedy's "Sister Souljah" was Adlai Stevenson, who may have been a hero to the party's left but was constantly derided by Kennedy insiders as being too soft to be president.
There have been occasional moments in the campaign when Obama has attempted to move to Clinton's right, particularly when he talked about moving into Pakistan to hunt down terrorists, should events warrant it. But they've been few and far between and they've been clumsy. Perhaps more important, they don't seem authentic.
No one is going to go negative against Obama now: Why bother? But if he gets to face Clinton one-on-one, he is going to be enormously vulnerable to a "red phone ad" -- similar to the one Walter Mondale effectively ran against Gary Hart in 1984 that implied rather strongly that Hart didn't have the toughness to be commander-in-chief.
The sad truth is that what the Journal poll shows is that right now, all the leading Democratic contenders have enormous liabilities. Where is Al Gore when you need him?
(wyldwolf says: Gore has them, too.)http://time-blog.com/real_clear_politics/2007/11/obamas_achilles_heel.htmlSteven Stark analyses that same WSJ/ABC News poll and concludes that Obama has plenty of his own liabilities, though they are different from Clinton’s. He’s right about that, but I would also point out that part of the alleged appeal of Obama’s candidacy (his supposed ”freshness,” representing a break with the past, being inspiring, etc.) does not seem to be distinguishing him from Clinton among Democratic voters.
When Democratic primary voters are asked (question 25 and following) to rate Clinton on “being inspirational and an exciting choice for president,” 64% give her the top two ratings available. When they rate Obama, he can only get 56%. One of the central elements of Obama’s campaign is supposed to be that he is the inspirational and exciting representative of a new generation, etc., but Democratic voters are apparently (inexplicably) more inspired and excited by Clinton. (She does have an exclamation point on her campaign signs, so maybe that has something to do with it.) Likewise, on the question of “bringing real change to the country,” Clinton outscores him again among Democratic primary voters 63 to 52. If he can’t convince members of his own party that he is more inspirational and more likely to bring change–two signature themes of his campaign–than Hillary Clinton, he hasn’t a chance of convincing anybody else.
http://larison.org/2007/11/09/obamas-weaknesses/
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