New poll shows Barack Obama tanking in Pennsylvania
The first fresh poll results from Pennsylvania are in since Barack Obama's "bitter" comments about people in small towns exploded as a news story, and the findings could hardly be worse for the Democratic presidential contender.
Intriguingly, the man in charge of the survey said interviews with voters indicate Obama's tumble in the state has more to do with what the candidate himself has said were ill-chosen words than anything else.
The new poll by American Research Group -- conducted Friday, Saturday and Sunday -- gave Clinton 57% and Obama 37% (based on interviews with 600 Democrats, the survey has an error margin of plus-or-minus 4 percentage points). The 20-point margin is all the more dramatic because, just the week before, an ARG poll found the pair in a flat-out tie in Pennsylvania, each with 45%.
The previous findings had put the race closer than any others. And perhaps the new one exaggerates the bounce Clinton has gotten from the storm over Obama's remarks at a San Francisco fund-raiser. Other pollsters are in the field in Pennsylvania, and we eagerly await their results (an L.A. Times/Bloomberg poll of Democrats in the Keystone State -- as well as in North Carolina and Indiana -- will be ready mid-week).
Regardless, the New Hamphire-based ARG poll, may have identified a tactical worry for the Obama camp above and beyond the current controversy. Dick Bennett, head of the poll, told us today that even before the furor erupted, it appeared many Pennsylvania Democrats began to turn against Obama because they are simply sick and tired of seeing and hearing his ads.
Much as campaign consultants would be loath to agree, Bennett opined that a candidate "can spend too much money" on an ad campaign, and the saturation of Obama spots ...
in Pennsylvania appear to be a classic example of "overkill" that ultimately does harm.
Bennett also reported that some of the Pennsylvanians who his company contacted went on to complain about the substance of the ubiquitous Obama ads. They are "about him, not voters or what their concerns are," Bennett said. And Obama's comment on attitudes in small towns served to reinforce that feeling.
It took him over a month to recover from Wright and about the same to chip away at Clinton's initial lead in PA. He has no time to make up these losses.
{b.s.e.}
quote:
Originally posted by josh4
This is really bad.
It took him over a month to recover from Wright and about the same to chip away at Clinton's initial lead in PA. He has no time to make up these losses.
he has the next 4 years to think about why he shouldn't say what means, nor mean what he says. :wtf:
MisterOpus1
quote:
Originally posted by josh4
This is really bad.
It took him over a month to recover from Wright and about the same to chip away at Clinton's initial lead in PA. He has no time to make up these losses.
Josh, RELAX. Hillary has no chance of catching Obama, even if she does beat him bad in Pennsylvania. He's too far ahead in the delegate count, and the supers are not going to be persuaded by her bull, especially when they know she can't catch him.
It's pathetic what she's doing, especially playing the same talking points as the Republican candidate that the Dems are trying to beat, but that's all she has left. This race was over long ago.
And let's also not forget that PA is still a week away, plus the fact that ARG has been nothing but ing notorious at under representing Obama:
This is what happens to candidates at the top - they get thrown at them from the bottom. Problem for Hillary is, he's too far up for her to catch him.
josh4
quote:
Originally posted by MisterOpus1
Josh, RELAX. Hillary has no chance of catching Obama, even if she does beat him bad in Pennsylvania. He's too far ahead in the delegate count, and the supers are not going to be persuaded by her bull, especially when they know she can't catch him.
It's pathetic what she's doing, especially playing the same talking points as the Republican candidate that the Dems are trying to beat, but that's all she has left. This race was over long ago.
And let's also not forget that PA is still a week away, plus the fact that ARG has been nothing but ing notorious at under representing Obama:
This is what happens to candidates at the top - they get thrown at them from the bottom. Problem for Hillary is, he's too far up for her to catch him.
I wish I shared your enthusiasm. I just wouldn't be surprised if what you're saying isn't possible, became reality. It'd simply fall in line with all the other disappointments we've known the past 7 years.
Checkout this ad she just started airing. Damn that was fast, what a bitch.
Lebezniatnikov
quote:
Originally posted by josh4
Does anyone else find it ironic that the people in that video sound bitter about the whole thing?
Q5echo
quote:
Candidate on a High Horse
Barack Obama may be exactly what his supporters suppose him to be. Not, however, for reasons most Americans will celebrate.
Obama may be the fulfillment of modern liberalism. Explaining why many working-class voters are "bitter," he said they "cling" to guns, religion and "antipathy to people who aren't like them" because of "frustrations." His implication was that their primitivism, superstition and bigotry are balm for resentments they feel because of America's grinding injustice.
By so speaking, Obama does fulfill liberalism's transformation since Franklin Roosevelt. What had been under FDR a celebration of America and the values of its working people has become a doctrine of condescension toward those people and the supposedly coarse and vulgar country that pleases them.
When a supporter told Adlai Stevenson, the losing Democratic presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956, that thinking people supported him, Stevenson said, "Yes, but I need to win a majority." When another supporter told Stevenson, "You educated the people through your campaign," Stevenson replied, "But a lot of people flunked the course." Michael Barone, in "Our Country: The Shaping of America From Roosevelt to Reagan," wrote: "It is unthinkable that Roosevelt would ever have said those things or that such thoughts ever would have crossed his mind." Barone added: "Stevenson was the first leading Democratic politician to become a critic rather than a celebrator of middle-class American culture -- the prototype of the liberal Democrat who would judge ordinary Americans by an abstract standard and find them wanting."
Stevenson, like Obama, energized young, educated professionals for whom, Barone wrote, "what was attractive was not his platform but his attitude." They sought from Stevenson "not so much changes in public policy as validation of their own cultural stance." They especially rejected "American exceptionalism, the notion that the United States was specially good and decent," rather than -- in Michelle Obama's words -- "just downright mean."
The emblematic book of the new liberalism was "The Affluent Society" by Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith. He argued that the power of advertising to manipulate the bovine public is so powerful that the law of supply and demand has been vitiated. Manufacturers can manufacture in the American herd whatever demand the manufacturers want to supply. Because the manipulable masses are easily given a "false consciousness" (another category, like religion as the "opiate" of the suffering masses, that liberalism appropriated from Marxism), four things follow:
First, the consent of the governed, when their behavior is governed by their false consciousnesses, is unimportant. Second, the public requires the supervision of a progressive elite which, somehow emancipated from false consciousness, can engineer true consciousness. Third, because consciousness is a reflection of social conditions, true consciousness is engineered by progressive social reforms. Fourth, because people in the grip of false consciousness cannot be expected to demand or even consent to such reforms, those reforms usually must be imposed, for example, by judicial fiats.
The iconic public intellectual of liberal condescension was Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, who died in 1970 but whose spirit still permeated that school when Obama matriculated there in 1981. Hofstadter pioneered the rhetorical tactic that Obama has revived with his diagnosis of working-class Democrats as victims -- the indispensable category in liberal theory. The tactic is to dismiss rather than refute those with whom you disagree.
Obama's dismissal is: Americans, especially working-class conservatives, are unable, because of their false consciousness, to deconstruct their social context and embrace the liberal program. Today that program is to elect Obama, thereby making his wife at long last proud of America.
Hofstadter dismissed conservatives as victims of character flaws and psychological disorders -- a "paranoid style" of politics rooted in "status anxiety," etc. Conservatism rose on a tide of votes cast by people irritated by the liberalism of condescension.
Obama voiced such liberalism with his "bitterness" remarks to an audience of affluent San Franciscans. Perfect.
When Democrats convened in San Francisco in 1984, en route to losing 49 states, Jeane Kirkpatrick -- a former FDR Democrat then serving in the Cabinet of another such, Ronald Reagan -- said "San Francisco Democrats" are people who "blame America first." Today they blame Americans for America being "downright mean."
Obama's apology for his embittering sociology of "bitterness" -- "I didn't say it as well as I should have" -- occurred in Muncie, Ind. Perfect.
In 1929 and 1937, Robert and Helen Lynd published two seminal books of American sociology. They were sympathetic studies of a medium-size manufacturing city they called "Middletown," coping -- reasonably successfully, optimistically and harmoniously -- with life's vicissitudes. "Middletown" was in fact Muncie, Ind.
Originally posted by Q5echo
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interesting read.
Lebezniatnikov
George Will is a noted Obama hater... hardly incisive. Plus, Jeanne Kirkpatrick (whom he quotes) is most notable for providing the philosophical under-pinnings of modern day neo-conservativism, and NOT for her liberal insights.
jerZ07002
quote:
Originally posted by Lebezniatnikov
George Will is a noted Obama hater... hardly incisive. Plus, Jeanne Kirkpatrick (whom he quotes) is most notable for providing the philosophical under-pinnings of modern day neo-conservativism, and NOT for her liberal insights.
do you have a criticism of obama?
NeoPhono
quote:
Originally posted by josh4
I wish I shared your enthusiasm. I just wouldn't be surprised if what you're saying isn't possible, became reality. It'd simply fall in line with all the other disappointments we've known the past 7 years.
Checkout this ad she just started airing. Damn that was fast, what a bitch.
With Hillary now getting booed for attacking Obama on this issue, and his current 10-point national lead over Hillary, I don't think there's too much to be concerned about. Thankfully (and hopefully).
