From the Los Angeles Times, “Barack Obama’s Image Suffers Amid John McCain Attacks, Poll Finds” by Michael Finnegan More good polling news for the Maverick. The latest L.A. Times/Bloomberg effort shows McCain pulling within two of Obama, trailing by the razor thin margin of 45-43. In June, the Times/Bloomberg showed Obama with a 12 point lead. The Times is clear on what has caused Obama’s stunning fall from grace:
I’m happy that the Times credits the McCain campaign for such scary effectiveness – after all, I have friends working there. But isn’t there another side to the equation? Yes, the McCain campaign in the Schmidt era has done a nice job, but doesn’t Team Barry and Obama Himself deserve some credit for pummeling his own numbers? Initially, Obama-philes like Andrew Sullivan referred to Obama’s exciting foreign adventure as an “objectively miraculous fortnight.” Now, even Sullivan sees that the trip revealed the worst aspects of Obama. Although Andrew doesn’t typically bother to list Obama’s greatest shortcomings, I will – a preening narcissism, a fondness for platitudes, a tendency to whine and a potentially fatal lack of substance. It’s the latter failing that may truly doom Obama. People who have followed the campaign closely for a while have long since discovered that Obama is the ultimate one-trick pony. Provided with a teleprompter, he delivers a speech very nicely. But even that talent has grown stale as he has run out of material. He hits the same “uplift” themes repeatedly, and shows a seeming allergy to getting specific. Obama also has the problem that that the press still paints an unrealistic portrait of him. Check out the venerable font of conventional wisdom, David Gergen, writing this afternoon:
Let’s put aside the fact that Gergen was perhaps a little behind the curve with his assessment of Obama’s eloquence. Some of us happened to notice the profusion of “ahs” and “ums” that litter every extemporaneous Obama utterance before Saturday night’s debate. Let’s instead focus on Gergen’s assessment that Obama is the “far more thoughtful” of the two candidates. I would love to hear Gergen dilate on how he reached that conclusion. Is it Obama’s robust independent streak that Gergen is tacitly nodding at? Wait a second – it can’t be. On virtually every subject ranging from Clarence Thomas to nuclear weapons, Obama is a font of the most hackneyed, liberal, conventional wisdom. Perhaps Gergen has inferred from all the “ums” that Obama loses himself in deep thought whenever he speaks. Or maybe he just manufactured Obama’s “far more thoughtful” nature out of whole cloth. Regardless, the rest of the country is beginning to discover some things about Obama that serious Obama observers have known for a while. Obama doesn’t wear well. He didn’t wear well in the Democratic primaries, and it appears he’s wearing no better in the general election season.
