Oregon/Kentucky results show Dem Unease with Obama
Watching Hillary Clinton declare victory tonight in Kentucky, I was struck by how stilted she looked, as if she were happy by the margin of her victory, but resented having to give a speech declaring as much. Gone was the gloat that seemed to accompany similar addresses. It was clear she was reading from a text.
Obama, as I sort of noted before, had almost the opposite problem, he spoke with great fluency. Maybe he was reading from a prepared text, but he made it seem he was talking off the cuff. But, still the content seemed banal, as if he were merely repeating his talking points. At times, he did seem delighted with his own ability to come up with a clever turn of phrase on the stump to add some spice to his his speech.
He also came across as angry, as if he were somehow unhappy with the evening’s results. He just didn’t seem pleased he had reached the milestone he claimed when he declared he had won “a majority of delegates elected by the American people.” Um, Senator, do you only consider Democrats to be Americans, given that you only won a majority of your party’s delegates?
Maybe he was unhappy because while he split the primaries with Mrs. Clinton, him taking Oregon, she Kentucky, she won by a much wider margin in the Bluegrass State than his current margin in the Beaver State. By my projections (based on 75% of the Oregon vote counted as I write this), she should win about 135,000 won 141,396 more votes than he did tonight. And the media and many party leaders have written her off as a has-been in this year’s contest.
Even as the media has all but declared Obama the nominee, his rival, the apparent loser, has declared yet again that she’s “winning the popular vote.” But, the MSM seems to ignore her hefty vote total tonight, with Yahoo! leading with a story declaring him on the “brink of nomination.” (The article said her Kentucky victory had “scant political value” as if copying from an Obama media advisory.)
While preparing dinner tonight and listening to the talking heads on FoxNews, two comments caught my attention. First, Bill Kristol’s observation than since the Wisconsin primary on February 19, Mrs. Clinton has won a clear majority of the popular vote. She’s being doing better as he’s presumed the nominee. Shouldn’t a candidate be increasing his share of the vote as his nomination becomes ever more likely?
Second, Fred Barnes’ assertion that if the Florida and Michigan results counted, she’d be headed toward the nomination. Howard Dean’s peremptory decision to strip those two states of their delegates really helped the Illinois Senator.
Basically, rank-and-file Democrats don’t seem to be rallying around their party’s nominee. While leading Democrats want to close ranks around Barack Obama, 62 percent of Oregon Democrats want the contest to continue. “Only 28 percent say the campaign should end as soon a possible.” And this in a state Obama won.
Democratic leaders and the MSM may be delighted with Obama as their party’s standard bearer, but Democratic voters still have questions about their likely nominee.
Maybe Senator Obama was aware of those questions and the challenges he faces in answering them that caused him to seem so off this evening.
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It doesn’t happen often, but I can’t help but basically agree with this post. With Obama now the presumptive nominee, I would’ve hoped that more democrats would want to vote for the winner. Not the he needs to win every state, or anything. Clinton supporters still have every right to support their candidate. Hell, I think Ron Paul is still technically in the race and getting lots of votes.
I’m not worried for November though. Obama is an unconventional democrat, McCain is an unconventional republican. Both will certainly have less support from the rank-and-file and both will undobtedly have more support from the opposite party.
Comment by James — May 21, 2008 @ 3:09 am - May 21, 2008
In short? Yes.
Pfffft! It’s Kentucky! One of those states. Flyover country bumpkins. Who cares what they think? Besides, everyone knows they didn’t vote for Obama because he’s black.
Comment by American Elephant — May 21, 2008 @ 5:10 am - May 21, 2008
Michelle Malkin catalogs Obama’s continuing displays of ignorance, some of them worse than Dan Quayle’s famous “potatoe”:
http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=MWZjY2YzZWVkMjdkMDEzMGQ0MjJkNTUyN2FkNmMzYTc
If I were still a Democrat, I’d be uneasy about Obama too.
Comment by ILoveCapitalism — May 21, 2008 @ 10:24 am - May 21, 2008
Michelle Malkin?! oh puleez–do we really need to go THERE?!
Comment by rayy — May 21, 2008 @ 10:30 am - May 21, 2008
What was really telling about last night was the Fox News exit poll which showed that 50% of Kentucky voters would NOT vote for Obama in the general election, and that 33% would vote for McCain.
Democrat “buyer’s remorse” setting in?
Regards,
Peter H.
Comment by Peter Hughes — May 21, 2008 @ 10:43 am - May 21, 2008
The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the - Web Reconnaissance for 05/21/2008 A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day…so check back often.
Comment by David M — May 21, 2008 @ 11:30 am - May 21, 2008
rayy, I love it how you respond with some sort of vague personal attack on Malkin - instead of looking at the facts gathered in her article.
Really. I love it. Such lameness on your part totally concedes the argument.
Comment by ILoveCapitalism — May 21, 2008 @ 12:06 pm - May 21, 2008
Since rayy is apparently click-challenged and/or doesn’t like facts about Obama, let’s bring in those facts.
——————————————-
Barack Gaffes
The Obama machine.
By Michelle Malkin
All it takes is one gaffe to taint a Republican for life. The political establishment never let Dan Quayle live down his fateful misspelling of “potatoe.” The New York Times distorted and misreported the first President Bush’s questions about new scanner technology at a grocers’ convention to brand him permanently as out of touch.
But what about Barack Obama? The guy’s a perpetual gaffe machine. Let us count the ways, large and small, that his tongue has betrayed him throughout the campaign:
Last May, he claimed that tornadoes in Kansas killed a whopping 10,000 people: “In case you missed it, this week, there was a tragedy in Kansas. Ten thousand people died — an entire town destroyed.” The actual death toll: 12.
Earlier this month in Oregon, he redrew the map of the United States: “Over the last 15 months, we’ve traveled to every corner of the United States. I’ve now been in 57 states? I think one left to go.”
Last week, in front of a roaring Sioux Falls, S.D., audience, Obama exulted: “Thank you, Sioux City. … I said it wrong. I’ve been in Iowa for too long. I’m sorry.”
Explaining last week why he was trailing Hillary Clinton in Kentucky, Obama again botched basic geography: “Sen. Clinton, I think, is much better known, coming from a nearby state of Arkansas. So it’s not surprising that she would have an advantage in some of those states in the middle.” On what map is Arkansas closer to Kentucky than Illinois?
Obama has as much trouble with numbers as he has with maps. Last March, on the anniversary of the Bloody Sunday march in Selma, Ala., he claimed his parents united as a direct result of the civil rights movement: “There was something stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, Ala., because some folks are willing to march across a bridge. So they got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born.”
Obama was born in 1961. The Selma march took place in 1965. His spokesman, Bill Burton, later explained that Obama was “speaking metaphorically about the civil-rights movement as a whole.”
Earlier this month in Cape Girardeau, Mo., Obama showed off his knowledge of the war in Afghanistan by homing in on a lack of translators: “We only have a certain number of them, and if they are all in Iraq, then it’s harder for us to use them in Afghanistan.” The real reason it’s “harder for us to use them” in Afghanistan: Iraqis speak Arabic or Kurdish. The Afghanis speak Pashto, Farsi, or other non-Arabic languages.
Over the weekend in Oregon, Obama pleaded ignorance of the decades-old, multibillion-dollar massive Hanford nuclear-waste cleanup: “Here’s something that you will rarely hear from a politician, and that is that I’m not familiar with the Hanford, uuuuhh, site, so I don’t know exactly what’s going on there. (Applause.) Now, having said that, I promise you I’ll learn about it by the time I leave here on the ride back to the airport.”
I assume on that ride, a staffer reminded him that he’s voted on at least one defense-authorization bill that addressed the “costs, schedules, and technical issues” dealing with the nation’s most contaminated nuclear-waste site.
Last March, the Chicago Tribune reported this little-noticed nugget about a fake autobiographical detail in Obama’s Dreams from My Father: “Then, there’s the copy of Life magazine that Obama presents as his racial awakening at age 9. In it, he wrote, was an article and two accompanying photographs of an African-American man physically and mentally scarred by his efforts to lighten his skin. In fact, the Life article and the photographs don’t exist, say the magazine’s own historians.”
And in perhaps the most seriously troubling set of gaffes of them all, Obama told a Portland crowd over the weekend that Iran doesn’t “pose a serious threat to us” — cluelessly arguing that “tiny countries” with small defense budgets can’t do us harm — and then promptly flip-flopped the next day, claiming, “I’ve made it clear for years that the threat from Iran is grave.”
Barack Obama — promoted by the Left and the media as an all-knowing, articulate, transcendent Messiah — is a walking, talking gaffe machine. How many more passes does he get? How many more can we afford?
© 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
——————————————-
As I said before: If I were still a Democrat, I’d be uneasy about Obama too, oh, right about now.
Comment by ILoveCapitalism — May 21, 2008 @ 12:10 pm - May 21, 2008
P.S. Looking at some of Malkin’s details… Isn’t Obama downright creepy? He is obsessed with race. I have heard him say before that he is “genetically” (his word) able to bridge the racial divide, having racial unity “in my DNA”. Only creeps and nutcases suggest we should elect them for (alleged) “genetic” reasons.
Comment by ILoveCapitalism — May 21, 2008 @ 12:26 pm - May 21, 2008
American Elephant said:
“Pfffft! It’s Kentucky! One of those states. Flyover country bumpkins. Who cares what they think? Besides, everyone knows they didn’t vote for Obama because he’s black.”
Calling people you don’t know at all country bumpkins and racists only shows your own bigotry. You probably know nothing about Kentucy, and likely have never even been there. I think its funny how Obama supporters cry racism…and then make racist, bigoted comments!!
Comment by Jon — May 21, 2008 @ 1:03 pm - May 21, 2008
#9 - ILC, I’ve always theorized that B. Hussein Obama’s speeches, his fan base, his MSM hysteria and assumed level of superiority brings back echoes of Munich circa 1933.
“Creepy” is putting it mildly.
And they call Bush the 21st century Hitler? Puh-leeze.
Regards,
Peter H.
Comment by Peter Hughes — May 21, 2008 @ 2:54 pm - May 21, 2008
Jon,
It’s called sarcasm. I was mocking the press, not Kentuckians.
Comment by American Elephant — May 21, 2008 @ 5:10 pm - May 21, 2008
#12 - AE, you have to forgive Jon. After all, liberals have no sense of humor. It’s part of their guilt complex.
Regards,
Peter H.
Comment by Peter Hughes — May 21, 2008 @ 5:24 pm - May 21, 2008
If you’re going to discuss voter unease, what about the Republican results Mcain get’s 80% in Kentucky and 85% in Oregon. People voted for candidates not even in the race or voted uncommitted rather than voting for the one who will clearly be the parties choice? Doesn’t that display a bit of unease?
Sad to see anyone admiring Malkin’s drool enough to post it on here.
Comment by Dave — May 21, 2008 @ 6:27 pm - May 21, 2008
O-o-o-o-h! I had no idea that Michelle Malkin had such high “low-standing” among the fact-challenged. Good on her! You know how effective you are by how much foam and frothing you cause among the liberal groupies and roadies.
Comment by heliotrope — May 21, 2008 @ 6:40 pm - May 21, 2008
The key point is up to 50% of these Democrats say they will NOT vote for Obama in the fall. They will vote for McCain or not vote at all. How do you square that and wish it away. Now the MSM has noted that the same was true in past fairly bitter primaries. But in other examples you were talking about maybe 15-25% of the primary voters not 50%. The Dems by nominating Barack a divisive figure, they are writing off, almost all toss up states. It will allow the Republicans to target….PA MI NM OH WI and CO. Three blue states three red states. Obama is in trouble in PA MI and WI right now. I see him becoming a weaker candidate as time goes on not stronger. Hispanics for whatever reason are not voitng for the black man in these primaries. So how does he win NM? FLA isn’t going to be even talked of as a tossup state anymore. Hispanics are going to flock to McCain. When you see Karl Roves electorial college map, how does Barack get to 271? (and by the way these EC maps aren’t a Rove invention, he has just done the fairly simple work of taking recent polls and coloring in a map. Some liberal blogs have a fit when the drive by media types mention Roves maps. If trained journalists would actual report or do some work, they could use crayons and color in the same maps.)
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/president/
Comment by Gene in Pennsylvania — May 21, 2008 @ 6:46 pm - May 21, 2008
Dan GPW, Hillsry was more animated and enthusiastic than I expected, although she was clearly tired.
I’m sure she had a lot on her mind. First, she must have been conflicted about Ted Kennedy. The Clintons were good friends of Ted and Vickie Kennedy. Ironically, just Monday night I finished a book that related some intimate dinners the two couples had. Yet, Kennedy endorsed Obama and campaigned for him in a number of states. Then, just a week or so ago, Kennedy really trashed Hillary when he raised strong objections to her being on the ticket as the Veep nominee.
Secondly, the woman has to be frustrated and bitterly disappointed. If the Democratic nominating season could be divided in two, Obama took the first half and Hillary has taken the second half. With her wins in Rhode Island, Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania, Indiana, West Virginia and Kentucky she has the momentum. I haven’t had time to check, but I’d make a wild guess that since mid-February she has won more votes, more states and more delegates than Obama. He is ahead in delegates only because he won so many caucuses.* She is clearly a stronger candidate against John McCain than Obama. Most of the super delegates are pros and they have to know she’s a better candidate in November than Obama. As I’ve written before, the super delegates jumping on Obama’s bandwagon are either obsessed with the left wing’s feel-good idea of electing America’s first black president or are afraid voting for Hillary will alienate blacks and the party will lose their knee-jerk support.
Geraldine Ferraro, who may end up voting Republican, was right on the money weeks ago when she dared speak the truth that Obama wouldn’t be where he is if he were a white junior senator from Illinois. And she was right on the money this week when she said the Obama camp and its friends in the media wouldn’t be trying to stop Hillary’s campaign if she were a man. (Damn those uppity women, they belong in the kitchen!) Obama’s half of the party is more sexist than Hillary’s half is racist.
Speaking of race, I am still livid over demands made of Hillary late last night by CNN pundits David Gergen, Jeffery Toobin and Gloria Borger. Several times, as has become typical in recent primaries, much was being made of the problems Obama is having appealing to rural white voters and other traditional Democratic constituencies. As surely should have been expected in the rural hills of Kentucky, a fairly large number of white voters said in exit polls that they couldn’t support Obama because he’s black. Gergen, Toobin and (with less enthusiasm) Borger demanded that Hillary tell her bigoted supporters she rejects their support. Why should she! Those white pro-Hillary voters aren’t any more racist than the 90 percent of black voters who are voting for Obama because he is black.
By the way, Dan, Obama’s speech was not off the cuff. Earlier in the evening CNN showed a crew putting up teleprompters for Obama’s speech.
I didn’t think he was as angry as he was impatient. According to the very, very, very pro-Obama Newsweek magazine, Obama tends to almost think he’s entitled to the nomination and dislikes having to campaign.
(* It’s a damn shame the federal courts pretty much say hands off when it comes to how the parties nominate their candidates. Otherwise, the courts would have to void the delegate selections in most, if not all, of this year’s Democratic caucuses. They simply don’t pass muster if provisions of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act are applied. It just plain flies against the Constitution to disenfranchise hundreds of thousand “average Joe” voters — included military personnel serving overseas — to make sure the left wing’s activists can dominate the caucuses.)
Comment by Trace Phelps — May 21, 2008 @ 8:39 pm - May 21, 2008
Obama’s the black Hitler, if Hitler was a muslim.
Comment by Nurglitch — May 21, 2008 @ 9:32 pm - May 21, 2008
#14 Dave - I *love* it how you respond with some sort of vague personal attack on Malkin and anyone who happens to put eyeballs on her articles - instead of looking at the facts gathered in her article.
Really. I love it! Such lameness on your part totally concedes the argument.
Comment by ILoveCapitalism — May 21, 2008 @ 9:57 pm - May 21, 2008
Was that what he was demonstrating when he tossed his racist grandmother under the bus, backed up and ran over her multiple times?
Based on the last sentence, I think Jon believed that AE was an Orgasma supporter, Pete.
Comment by ThatGayConservative — May 22, 2008 @ 1:12 am - May 22, 2008
#14: “Sad to see anyone admiring Malkin’s drool enough to post it on here.”
Wow. There’s a shocker. An ignorant, humorless wasteofspace hates Michelle Malkin. Of course you do. She’s a great American and you,…well, you probably read a comment thread over at HuffPost where everyone was debating whether she’s a “racist gook whore” or a “bigoted chink whore” and you figured,…yeah. probably. And what’s with the surprise that someone would post her “on here?” She’s a conservative. This is a conservative blog. The only thing that doesn’t belong here is you.
P.S. Good idea using “Malkin” since you were also using the world “drool.” If you’d just said “Michelle” and “drool,” naturally we would have thought you were referring to someone else entirely, and of course in her case, the more accurate word would be “spittle.”
Comment by Sean A — May 22, 2008 @ 4:48 pm - May 22, 2008
“The only thing that doesn’t belong here is you.”
Well Sean, that is a little bit nicer than F*&% Off. No I have never read the comments over at HuffPost, in fact I’ve only been to that site a couple of times
“An ignorant, humorless wasteofspace hates Michelle Malkin”
Hmm, I thought that conservatives were above personal insults. Looks like maybe you’re the one who should be posting on HuffPost, same hostile attitude towards people who disagree. Actually I don’t hate Michelle and after reading her article on Steven Curtis Chapman’s daughter I am willing to believe she actually has a heart. But, since my first introduction to her was a vicious hate piece about gays filled with the usual venomous hallucinations about us that the right likes to spew I put her in the catagory of too lost in the darkness and have little use for what she says. Because she may at times get facts correct does not change what she said and her clear disdain for liberals. Oh, but I guess that’s what makes you like her. I can accept that there are people who will never accept that homosexuals are normal, civilized people who deserve to be treated like anyone else but I cannot and will never accept that those who spread lies, exagerrations and hostility towards us are not dangerous to our lives. For a nationally read blogger to say such things is apalling and for those she has said them against to defend her is disgusting. She/you may know facts but the truth is something you have yet recognize.
Comment by Dave — May 26, 2008 @ 12:32 am - May 26, 2008
Here’s Obama showing off his fucking cock through his pants on an airplane.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F45rXyuTZjo
Comment by Vince P — May 26, 2008 @ 1:01 am - May 26, 2008