The Cable Gamer would like to pass along two rumors about Barack Obama:
First, that Obama is nothing more than a walking, talking version of Mother Jones magazine. You know, stereotypical San Francisco left-liberals. There is no liberal--oops, I mean "progressive"--cliche that Obama doesn't embrace: We believe in God and guns because we are bitter, we should learn Spanish to embrace our multicultural future, we should all be "community organizers," 60s bomb-radicals weren't bad, they simply "cared too much," we should turn our thermostats down, etc., etc.
Second, that Obama is a lefty Frankenstein, created in a bubbling vat in the basement of the Manhattan headquarters of the Ford Foundation. That is to say, he is the fantasy-product of limousine-liberal lefty multiculturalists--he is pro-abortion and pro-tax increase. He is a post-patriotic, post-American "citizen of the world."
OK, OK, neither of those rumors are true. They are jokes, not rumors. But rumors, absurd as they are, that are based on nuggets of truth. Obama is a doctrinaire liberal, whose Christianity is acceptable to the left only because he expressed his faith for 20 years in an America-bashing church.
But the real joke is on Obama, if he thinks that he can attack Fox News and thereby win over the swing voters who currently don't support him--or, frankly, even fear him.
Attacking Fox News will raise his favorables among MoJo readers and Ford Foundation grant-writers, but he had their support anyway. Where Obama needs help is among "red" voters, or at least "purple" voters. You know, swing voters. Also known as Reagan Democrats, or more recently as Hillary Clinton Democrats.
If you read The New York Times today--and bear in mind, this is the Times!--you see that plenty of blue-collar and middle-class voters in Pennsylvania have plenty of doubts about Obama.
For example, here's how the Times reports on one resident of Hopewell, PA:
Ivan Stickles talked of false rumors that Barack Obama did not shake hands with troops in Afghanistan, “I don’t have the time to check out if it’s true, but if it is, it’s very offensive.”
Such "ignorant" views, of course, will only earn Mr. Stickles the disdain of Manhattan and Beverly Hills--where did he go to college? But Mr. Stickles probably doesn't care too much--the bicoastals disdained him anyway. And Mr. Stickles knows it. The question is whether Obama is seen as closer to the bicoastals, or closer to Mr. Stickles and the 50 million or so Americans who are mostly like him.
But Democrats with a better handle on the American people as they are--that is, how ordinary people think about politics and voting--are sending neon-warnings to the Obama campaign: Knock it off!
Here's Howard Wolfson speaking this morning on "Fox & Friends, said that he would advise Obama not to attack Fox. And Wolfson knows whereof he speaks: A Pew Center survey released this week found something that most liberals might have a hard time accepting: No less than 61% of Fox News viewers did NOT regard themselves as Republicans. Which is to say, they are Democrats and independents, most of them, swing voters.
The cosmic joke of this presidential-election season is that the chief strategist of the Hillary Rodham Clinton campaign, Mark Penn, had the right idea for beating Obama. Penn's problem is that he tried to implement that strategy inside the Democratic Party, where a majority of those who vote think that Obama's leftism is perfectly acceptable. And so Hillary lost. But of course, John McCain's campaign has picked up the Penn strategy, and is using it effectively to paint Obama as a Mother Jones/Ford Foundation leftist. And that Penn-McCain strategy, of course, has the virtue of being true.
So what should Obama do? He should stop bashing Fox News, and instead, go on its air constantly. Love bomb the Fox audience. Kill Sean Hannity with kindness.
But Obama won't do it, of course. He would rather play to his liberal-left base. And so, after November, as the junior Senator from Illinois, he can keep his rockstar status when he visits the offices of MoJo and Ford.
