“He is a little like Adlai Stevenson. You ask him a question, and he gives you a six-minute answer. And the six-minute answer is smart as all get out. It’s intellectual. It’s well framed. It takes care of all the contingencies. But it’s a lousy soundbite.” — Governor Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania
Apparently Governor Ed Rendell watched the Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency. This is one of Senator Obama’s problem, he over intellectualizes every comment and it gets him in trouble. To begin with he comes off as aloof and out of touch and secondly, Obama then faces media scrutiny over every comma, every nuance. The infantcide debate that he now faces is a direct result of his over answering a question.
From the Washington Post:
Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell captured the jitters of the Democratic Party today when he conceded that for all Barack Obama’s gifts, “he’s not exactly the easiest guy in the world to identify with” and urged the presumptive nominee to start punching back against Republican attacks.
In a wide ranging interview, Rendell insisted that while Obama still has not won over perhaps 30 percent of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s voters, he will have locked down 95 percent of them by midnight tonight, after Clinton speaks to the Democratic National Convention here. But Rendell, a strong Clinton supporter during the primaries, made it clear he thinks Obama still has work to do with the white, working class voters who backed her.
“With people who have a lot of gifts, it’s hard for people to identify with them,” the governor said. “Barack Obama is handsome. He’s incredibly bright. He’s incredibly well spoken, and he’s incredibly successful — not exactly the easiest guy in the world to identify with.”
For a politician cut from a rougher cloth, Rendell may have offered a back-handed compliment when he compared Obama to Adlai Stevenson, the failed Democratic candidate from the 1950s who captured the imagination of American intellectuals but not the electorate at large.
“He is a little like Adlai Stevenson,” Rendell mused. “You ask him a question, and he gives you a six-minute answer. And the six-minute answer is smart as all get out. It’s intellectual. It’s well framed. It takes care of all the contingencies. But it’s a lousy soundbite.”
“We’ve got to start smacking back in short understandable bites,” he said, noting “Everybody is nervous as all get out. Everybody says we ought to be ahead by 10, 15 points. What the heck is going on?”
For all that worry, Rendell’s prognosis for Obama is good, at least in his crucial state. The addition of Scranton-born Joe Biden to the Democratic ticket probably pads Obama’s thin lead by two percentage points, Rendell said, and the economy will ultimately persuade people to look beyond personality, background and race to focus on policy. Obama needs to make his economic proposals more understandable, and to show some real anger, especially about issues like the United States financing Iraq’s reconstruction while the Iraqi government holds an oil-fueled government surplus.
“What I think most people are waiting for — and as soon as they see it, I think it’s over — they’re waiting to see that he’s angry about that stuff, too. Not just that he thinks it’s wrong intellectually — that he’s angry,” Rendell advised.
In the end, though, “When times are hard, people care about one thing, one color — green,” he concluded. “That’s all there is.”
If you look at the poster from the 1952 campaign, you’ll notice that both Presidents Roosevelt and Truman are hightlighted. Do you think Obama will ever even mention the name of the only two-term Democratic President in the last half century out on the campaign trail? Of course not, because it is all about him and guess what that plays to McCain’s advantage because McCain is making this race a referendum on Obama himself.