Last Call for Change We Can Believe In, by Frank Rich

[jefferson_dem]

Last Call for Change We Can Believe In
By FRANK RICH
Published: August 23, 2008

AS the real campaign at last begins in Denver this week, this much is certain: It’s time for Barack Obama to dispatch “Change We Can Believe In” to a dignified death.

This isn’t because — OMG! — Obama’s narrow three- to four-percentage-point lead of recent weeks dropped to a statistically indistinguishable one- to three-point margin during his week of vacation. It’s because zero hour is here. As the presidential race finally gains the country’s full attention, the strategy that vanquished Hillary Clinton must be rebooted to take out John McCain.

“Change We Can Believe In” was brilliantly calculated for a Democratic familial brawl where every candidate was promising nearly identical change from George Bush. It branded Obama as the sole contender with the un-Beltway biography, credibility and political talent to link the promise of change to the nation’s onrushing generational turnover in all its cultural (and, yes, racial) manifestations. McCain should be a far easier mark than Clinton if Obama retools his act.

What we have learned this summer is this: McCain’s trigger-happy temperament and reactionary policies offer worse than no change. He is an unstable bridge back not just to Bush policies but to an increasingly distant 20th-century America that is still fighting Red China in Vietnam and the Soviet Union in the cold war. As the country tries to navigate the fast-moving changes of the 21st century, McCain would put America on hold.

What Obama also should have learned by now is that the press is not his friend. Of course, he gets more ink and airtime than McCain; he’s sexier news. But as George Mason University’s Center for Media and Public Affairs documented in its study of six weeks of TV news reports this summer, Obama’s coverage was 28 percent positive, 72 percent negative. (For McCain, the split was 43/57.) Even McCain’s most blatant confusions, memory lapses and outright lies still barely cause a ripple, whether he’s railing against a piece of pork he in fact voted for, as he did at the Saddleback Church pseudodebate last weekend, or falsifying crucial details of his marital history in his memoirs, as The Los Angeles Times uncovered in court records last month.

What should Obama do now? As premature panic floods through certain liberal precincts, there’s no shortage of advice: more meat to his economic plan, more passion in his stump delivery, less defensiveness in response to attacks and, as is now happening, sharper darts at a McCain lifestyle so extravagant that we are only beginning to learn where all the beer bullion is buried.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/opinion/24rich.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin

[Cha]

1. Don't worry Frank...Obama knows the press is not his

friend..that's why he won the primaries and is going to win the Presidency in spite of bush&mcain's base, the m$m.

But, thanks for saying Obama is sexier than a demented derelict.

[Democrats_win]

2. Frank Rich captures the state of the Union. Save this article for future generations to (enjoy?)

or (despise). Despise because for the third time in a row, America chose wrong.

[blogslut]

3. Oh my

This is an exceptionally fine Frank Rich this week. He's right, the famous Obama stump speech is getting old. America knows him. Just because the idiot press say America doesn't know him, that doesn't make it true. It's time to display all the goods, not just the signature collection. And I agree, smacking back at old man McSame isn't gonna make Obama any less pretty.