PrintAugust 19, 2007
Obama campaign retreats in the face of gaffes
In what appears to be tacit acknowledgement of recent embarrassing blunders, Barack Obama will be cutting back on his appearances in candidate forums. When Obama has been asked to think on his feet about such weighty issues as meeting with foreign despot enemies in his first year as president and invading our ally Pakistan, the results have not been pretty. And Obama has fallen sharply in the polls, to the benefit of Hillary Clinton.
The Obama campaign has posted a memo on its website written by campaign manager David Plouffe, promising that Obama will be cutting back on debates, specifically the candidate forums not sponsored by the DNC itself.
Needless to say, there is no mention of Obama's amateurish gaffes. The reason offered is that there are just too darned many of the forums to attend and it is just getting in the way of the meetin' the folks, doncha know.
Candidate forums - where candidates appear sequentially will be considered, but we are unlikely to accept many of these. Instead, Barack will spend his time answering questions directly from voters in places like Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada, and elsewhere. We simply cannot continue to hopscotch from forum to forum and run a campaign true to the bottom up movement for change that propelled Barack into this race.
Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic's blog reported on the memo yesterday, even before it was posted on the campaign website. A nice scoop. He notes how the campaign is seeking to limit the damage from this move.
Plouffe makes sure to mention that Obama "was scored the clear winner by undecided voters in South Carolina and New Hampshire," a sentence that innoculates Obama from charges that he is afraid to debate or peforms poorly in them.
Campaign rhetoric aside, it is hard to ignore the damage Obama has done to his prospects by exposing his naiveté, and hard to interpret this pull-back as other than a realization that he has to be much better prepared when he ventures forth to speak with some degree of spontaneity on the video record.
So expect Obama to just stick to those printed speeches and prepared talking points - so that David Axelrod will not have to clean up so much later.
It's too bad the political pros will not let Obama be Obama. But then again, they must realize he's not ready for prime time all the time.
Hat tip: Ed Lasky
