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red states rule
07-16-2008, 09:31 AM
The messiah has put his base in a dep funk. His flip flopping and trail of broken promises have them asking what happened to new breed of Presidential candidate


Obama Backers Beg For Clarity From Candidate
Asks One Big Bundler:‘What’s Going On?’Schoen: ‘10 Points’

by Jason Horowitz | July 15, 2008 |


snip

It hasn’t simply been a question of progressive loyalists being dismayed by a perceived general-election shift to the center. There’s some of that, certainly—see Mr. Obama’s unprompted criticism of a months-old ad campaign by MoveOn.org, or his Senate vote, against most of his party, on a bill to authorize government wiretapping.

More basically, there has been a sense that despite Mr. Obama’s massive material and infrastructural advantages over John McCain—an unprecedentedly large network of online donors, ridiculous high early staff levels in non-swing states, Howitzer-vs.-mosquito responses to opposition ads—he has too often found himself in a reactive posture, answering questions about his own positions rather than raising them about his opponent’s. Perhaps coincidentally, a solid-looking advantage Mr. Obama enjoyed in national polls shortly after the primary had more or less vanished in recent days, before recovering somewhat. (A Quinnipiac poll released on July 15 showed him back up by nine points.)

“I don’t think he has defined himself,” said Doug Schoen, a Democratic pollster. “I don’t think he has offered a contrast between himself and McCain. I don’t think either of them has been particularly compelling. But let’s just say that one would have thought that Obama would have had a lead that would be closer to 10 points.”

Before the foreign policy speech in Washington, at least, Mr. Obama’s apparent efforts to defy the McCain campaign’s liberal caricature of him merely served to invite charges of waffling, if not outright flip-flopping, designed to dilute his promise of “a different kind of politics.”

In the past month, Mr. Obama abandoned his commitment to public financing in order to avoid restrictions on his ability to raise massive sums online.

Normally, a staunch defender of abortion rights, Mr. Obama seemed to reject a mental health exception to the ban on late-term abortions in an interview with a Christian magazine.

He commended the Supreme Court’s reading of the Second Amendment to protect individual gun ownership rights.

In a speech about patriotism, he deliberately placed distance between himself and the adoring left-leaning Netroots by attacking MoveOn.org for last September’s “General BetrayUs” ad.

http://www.observer.com/2008/politics/obama-backers-beg-clarity-candidate