Posted by
beltway girl on Sunday, April 20, 2008 2:37:07 AM
The most important point of Hillary Clinton's campaign came recently, and it was not delivered in the Pennsylvania debate.
It was delivered by Gallup.
Hillary Clinton is a point ahead of Barack Obama. But the single point lead isn't in Pennsylvania, as it was several weeks ago. It is a lead in the national Democratic nomination poll.
You have to go back to mid-March to find a Hillary Clinton lead in the national polls for the nomination. You have to go back to around St. Patrick's Day, and you have to look at Fox or CBS News polls for a similarly small, arguably insignificant lead, and these particular polls aren't all that reliable.
Gallup, though, is reliable. And this lead, this single point, it may mean little in the world of polls and statistics, but in our world, it may turn out to be anything but insignificant.
Mid-March. Jeremiah Wright's YouTube debut was just catching fire. That might explain the mid-March spike for Clinton.
But this is moving into late April. The new candidate of inevitability should be well beyond a Clinton surge of any kind in the national polls at this point.
What has happened? What dynamic is at work here?
This single point is not just a little spike in a poll near later April. This is Obama's Reverend Wright narrative moving into another chapter, this one involving an ambush of that bitter Gun-and-God crowd, in those pokey-doke, small towns of America.
Had it not been for Reverend Wright, Obama would have had it wrapped up in double digits by now. Had it not been for Obama's apparently continuing subtle adherence to some of Wright's disturbing ideological views, Obama would have had it wrapped up at least handily by now.
But Wright is out there now, and so is Obama's most recent smear of "middle-classness."
Pundits have been quick to fly to the defense of Obama in his time of need. Eleanor Clift said he was playing professor that day, and that there was really nothing wrong in what he said, the remarks were being spun out of control.
He definitely was playing professor that day. But this really is not a plausible defense for the remarks. Clift also said that Obama is himself a religious man, and this somehow should effectively quell any suspicion that he is attacking religion.
But Obama's religious preferences are at the very nexus of the firestorm which now, having been brewing for months, has finally exploded.
Obama is a religious man, but the practical outlet he has selected for the expression of his religion is separatist and radical by its very nature. Obama might be very attached to his own vehicle of religious expression, but this certainly would not preclude The Professor from attacking dissimilar vehicles, and, in this case, they'd be more widespread and conventional ones.
Yes, the day he made those remarks in San Francisco, he was playing professor.
What many voters and professors alike must be wondering, though, is why the acedemician Obama was so noticeably absent for the twenty years he spent in the pews before Reverend Wright with his Hamas updates in the newsletters.
Where, exactly, was The Professor then? How many professors, indeed, would have sat through Wright's sermons without a light bulb of Edisonesque proportions appearing over their heads? Arguably, how many professors sputtering the type of rhetoric that rolled off of Obama's tongue that day in San Francisco even would have bothered going to a church at all?
For twenty years before the separatist Reverend Wright, Obama did not have to suspend his critical thought processes.
However, those same thought processes kicked into overdrive when he played the role of professor for small-town voters, who probably would not have been too welcome in the Church of Reverend Wright. And Professor Obama wasn't praying with them, and kneeling with them. No, he was lecturing that day in San Francisco. And analyzing. And his thought-provoking analysis came unsolicited.
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."
-
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Wherein lies Obama's clash?
A single point lead moving into late April. It may not seem to mean anything in the unravelling matrix.
But it could very well be the magic bullet Annie Oakley has been waiting for.