Obama's summer of success
July 18, 2008
IT'S A tricky time, the period from the end of the primary season to the start of the political conventions.
Sultry weather settles in, vacation beckons, and public attention wanes. Breaking through is hard to do.
Still, Barack Obama has used the lazy days of summer to considerable advantage with a series of speeches aimed at rooting himself in mainstream American values.
"One of the most important qualities that people look for in a president is someone who shares their values, and Obama is showing them that he does," says Democratic strategist John Sasso, who has played an important role in almost every presidential campaign of the last quarter-century.
Adds Democratic pollster Geoffrey Garin, formerly a senior strategist for Hillary Clinton's campaign: "At the presidential level, there is a greater concern with understanding what makes somebody tick and whether they are motivated and driven by the same kind of values voters themselves have."
Obama has striven to show that he is. In a pre-Fourth of July address about patriotism in Independence, Mo., the Democratic candidate spoke about all this country means to him, crediting the American ethos for his own success. It "is this essential American idea - that we are not constrained by the accident of birth but can make of our lives what we will - that has defined my life, just as it has defined the life of so many other Americans," he said.
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http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/07/18/obamas_summer_of_success/
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