Tough tasks await Obama on march to convention
AS BARACK Obama vacations in Hawaii, his staff is on heightened image alert in these two weeks before his official nomination for president. The problem is not Republican John McCain. It is the Democratic dysfunction erupting and festering all around him.
With the revelation last week by John Edwards that he had an affair in 2006, Obama is now deprived of a significant weapon in the values arsenal at the party convention in Denver. The former North Carolina senator, 2004 vice presidential candidate, and a third-place burr in the campaigns of Obama and Hillary Clinton made some interesting noise in the campaign by recasting himself as the voice for the poor, the working class, and against Washington lobbyists.
He was one of the Democrats who denounced President Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky for its "remarkable disrespect for his office, for the moral dimensions of leadership, for his friends, for his wife, for his precious daughter. It is breathtaking to me the level to which that disrespect has risen." With Edwards's outrageous display of disrespect - as his wife was in remission from cancer - the party is one scandal closer to forgetting why it took back the leadership of the House and Senate in 2006. The Democrats won in part because voters were tired of Republican moral immolation.
Reports say the Edwards family will not be at the convention. It will be interesting to see how the Democrats now handle the morals issue in Denver, let alone the notion as to whether the poor will have any voice at all.
Then there is the never-quite-buried hatchet between the Obama and Clinton staffs. The Atlantic Monthly magazine, according to Politico.com, will report this week that Clinton's former top campaign strategist, Mark Penn, wanted to run a more aggressive campaign against Obama than what unfolded during the primaries. Penn wanted to strike at the very heart of imagined voter uncertainties as to how "American" Obama is.
In two excerpts printed yesterday by The New York Times, Penn wrote memos saying:
"All those articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared towards showing his background is diverse, multicultural, and putting that in a new light. Save it for 2050."
"I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values."
In another excerpt posted by Politico, Penn advised, "Let's explicitly own 'American' in our programs, the speeches, and the values. He doesn't."
As it was, the Clinton campaign periodically embarrassed itself as volunteers and high-level surrogates created firestorms by passing along right-wing rumors that Obama is Muslim, said his youthful cocaine use made him unelectable, or diminished him as an affirmative action baby. It is small wonder that with friends such as these in his own party, Obama, a Christian, continues to battle the notion that he is Muslim. Newsweek polls in April and May and Pew Research Center polls in March and July are all frozen at between 10 and 13 percent of Americans who think Obama is Muslim.
Given the tightness of the last two presidential elections, the Pew poll holds particular dangers for Obama. There is no difference in the percentage of Democrats or Republicans who think Obama is a Muslim. And of the Democrats who think Obama is Muslim, 19 percent said they preferred McCain over Obama. "Democrats who share the misconception are significantly less likely to support Obama," Pew said about the poll.
Obama of course had no control of the private life of John Edwards or the inner workings of the Clinton campaign. But if he is to be president, he has to overcome the corrosion of such episodes as these. Voters in major polls say they want change on domestic issues such as the economy. But they also still trust McCain more for dealing with Iraq and terrorism. The fact that one in 10 Americans still think he is Muslim is a sign that Obama has to go to Denver on a heightened mission to define the Democrats and himself.
Derrick Z. Jackson can be reached at jackson@globe.com. 