Obama was pummeled by Chris Matthews last night and he takes direct hits from Karl Rove in today’s WSJ (as does Hillary Clinton). But the unkindest cuts come from Joe Klein,:
In the course of six weeks, the American people learned that [Obama] was a member of a church whose pastor gave angry, anti-American sermons, that he was “friendly” with an American terrorist who had bombed buildings during the Vietnam era, and that he seemed to look on the ceremonies of working-class life — bowling, hunting, churchgoing and the fervent consumption of greasy food — as his anthropologist mother might have, with a mixture of cool detachment and utter bemusement. …
Yes, yes, the bulk of the sludge was caricature, and some of it, especially the stuff circulating on the Internet, was scurrilous trash. But there is an immutable pedestrian reality to American politics: you have to get the social body language right if you want voters to consider the nobler reaches of your message.
Not only that, but Klein claims that Hillary Clinton has found her sweet spot:
There was a warmth and a feistiness to Clinton in Pennsylvania — the very qualities that Obama was lacking. She had embraced the shameless rituals of politics, including some classic low-information signals, downing shots of Crown Royal and promising lower gas prices, attacking her opponent over trivia and threatening to “obliterate” Iran. It was enough to earn the ire of the New York Times editorial page, which harrumphed, “By staying on the attack and not engaging Mr. Obama on the substance of issues … she undercuts the rationale for her candidacy that led this page and others to support her: that she is more qualified, right now, to be President.”
Well, tsk-tsk and ahem!
Indeed. Klein closes by writing off his immediate cohort:
part of the problem with editorial writers — and, truth to tell, columnists like me — is a narrow definition of the qualifications necessary to be President. It helps to be a warrior, for one thing. It helps to be able to take a punch and deliver one — even, sometimes, a sucker punch. A certain familiarity with life as it is lived by normal Americans is useful; a distance from the élite precincts of academia, where unrepentant terrorists can sip wine in good company, is essential. Hillary Clinton has learned these lessons the hard way; Barack Obama thinks they are “the wrong lessons.” The nomination is, obviously, his to lose. But the presidency will not be won if he doesn’t learn that the only way to reach the high-minded conversation he wants, and the country badly needs, is to figure out how to maneuver his way through the gutter.
Klein apparently thinks that engaging low-information voters means getting into the gutter.
Apart from that absurd claim (see these posts, which include the words “low+information+voters”; see also this post—and in fact many of the posts I’ve written about Obama, beginning in early 2007), I couldn’t have said it any better myself.
