LITTWIN: Obama hits the rails in Pa.
By Mike Littwin, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)
Published April 21, 2008 at 12:05 a.m.
Photo by Scott Olson / Getty Images
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, lower right, is greeted by a throng of supporters at a town hall-style meeting Sunday at Reading High School in Reading, Pa. The Pennsylvania primary is Tuesday.
It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry. - Bob Dylan
It's the mother of all campaign photo-ops. Barack Obama is on a so-called whistle-stop train tour of southeastern Pennsylvania. The day is springtime gorgeous. The settings are perfect. The bunting is in place on the vintage 1930s-era "Georgia 300" car attached to an Amtrak train.
All that's left is for Obama to lean over the railing whenever a potential voter comes within hailing distance of the tracks. The trip is meant to evoke - if fleetingly - Harry Truman, who traveled over 20,000 whistle-stopping miles and made over 200 stops in 1948. Obama is going all of 100 miles and making four stops, but, still - imagine it - there is this church steeple to frame a crowd shot in Downington, and there is the large crowd gathered in front of the 1920s-era train station in Lancaster. It's irresistible.
The crowds are large everywhere. At each stop, Springsteen - who had just endorsed Obama as a superstar, if not a superdelegate- blares from the speakers. Obama enters to The Rising and he leaves to Land of Hopes and Dreams, in which, if you need help on the lyrics, thunder's rolling down the tracks.
And at each stop, Obama is - as he would put it - charged up. It's that kind of day. We're six weeks out from the last voting in this campaign, and anything remotely different - even if the most obvious change is in changing tracks - is welcome.
When Obama boards the train in Philadelphia, the conductor says he can blow the whistle. "Is that allowed?" Obama asks. It is. And so he does. The Georgia 300 is outfitted in old-style rail luxury, with even a Pullman bed with a pink bedspread. And, also, the whistle works. It's your childhood toy train set come to life.
"This is fun," Obama says, and you think he might actually mean it.
The night before, he had drawn an Oprah-sized crowd of around 35,000 in Philadelphia, and it must have looked to him like the worst was over, that he had put the stunningly poor debate performance behind him (if only ABC could say the same), that, if you believe the polls, Bittergate was fading as an issue.
The train travels along the Main Line - the Philly suburbs where, the experts say, the election should be decided. The politics of new - as Obama would have it - chug by in the transport of old.
If you see the crowds and the enthusiasm and the smile on Obama's face - or if you just think about Hillary Clinton's face when she drank that shot and beer - you'd think he must be unstoppable.
But, remember, we've seen it all before.
The question for Obama is not whether he'll keep a significant delegate lead after Tuesday's primary vote here - because he will - but why he can't seem to close Clinton out.
The idea that Clinton should somehow drop out of the race for the good of the party is, of course, as likely as the Nuggets dropping out of the playoffs after Game 1 against the Lakers.
For Clinton to leave the race - and she still has as good a chance as the Nuggets do - Obama has to force her out. His strategy here is to come close. The polls show him about five points behind. He'd be delighted with that.
Coming close will mean only that the campaign moves on to Indiana and North Carolina on May 6 - and that the war of attrition continues. Obama's problem in Pennsylvania is what they like to call demographics - or, to put it another way, the fact that so many of the bitter people live here. It's the same problem he faced in Ohio, where he lost by 10 points.
And there's another problem, which has been noted by several analysts. It's a pattern in this campaign season. Obama starts off in a state far behind, closes the gap with his TV money advantage and with his even larger charisma advantage, and then loses ground at the very end. It happened in California. It happened in New Hampshire. It happened in Texas. Maybe it's the experience factor. Maybe it's something else.
Still, the math is the math, and it's clear that, absent a disaster, Obama is going to be the Democratic nominee. It's clear, too, that any Democratic nominee will be favored to win in a year in which George Bush's approval ratings (now under 30 percent in some polls) threaten to disappear altogether. But it's also clear this late into the campaign that many Democrats still aren't entirely sold on Obama.
I take the one-day train trip because who doesn't like train trips and because I figure it will be instructive to see Obama give four speeches in fairly rapid order and get a new sense of the campaign.
Somebody asked me what's changed about Obama since the campaign began. Obviously, he's not as spontaneous as he was in the beginning. He's more polished - but less innocent. He talks about hope and change - and everyone in the crowd seems to buy it - but hope and change can mean different things on different days.
You can see what has happened. It isn't just the natural hardening that comes of a long and difficult political race. This is specific to Obama. If he doesn't fight back sufficiently hard, he gets called soft. If he goes down and dirty with Clinton, she calls him a hypocrite.
On this day, he's risking the hypocrite charge. The crowd doesn't seem to mind.
Someone here is holding a "Middle Class White Guy for Obama" sign. Another person calls out, "I love you." He says he loves the person back. No one faints, but you get the idea.
I'm standing with three Obama supporters, who are marveling at the size of the crowd.
"We need someone different," says Kathy Weaver. "And I'm a Republican. I can't vote for him Tuesday. But I'm going to vote for him in November."
This is not a day for soaring rhetoric. And he didn't do the Jay-Z "Dirt Off Your Shoulder" move, brushing off his suit jacket, the way he did the other day. But the thing to know about Obama is that he may be the first presidential candidate who could actually pull that off.
This is a day for moving down the track and, at each stop, Obama going after Clinton. For days, he had been hitting only McCain. But, now, listen in:
"Senator Clinton's essential argument in this campaign is you can't change how the game is played in Washington. Her basic argument is that the slash-and-burn, say-anything, do-anything special interest-driven politics is how it works. . . . Senator Clinton has internalized a lot of the strategies, the tactics, that have made Washington such a miserable place."
And again, at another stop, he assails her "kitchen sink" strategy: "She's got the kitchen sink flying, and the china flying, and the, you know, the buffet is coming at me."
It gets nastier than that. We're on the train when the Obama campaign holds a conference call. And Gen. Walter Stewart, retired, comes on the line to say that because of the non-sniper story, Clinton somehow lacks the "moral authority" to lay the wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, who might, after all, have been killed by a sniper.
It's such an absurd notion that the Obama people have to disown it the next day. And Obama admits his campaign is imperfect, and "if you get elbowed enough, you start elbowing back."
We're near the end. And, yes, elbows are flying. So is the buffet. Each side is accusing the other of smears. There are nasty robocalls. Clinton says Obama is "so negative." Obama says, "She's essentially saying, 'I'm bad, but he's just as bad.' What kind of message is that?"
And on Tuesday it will be done, and everyone will move on, to Indiana or North Carolina. Either way, I just wish I was taking the train.
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April 21, 2008
8 a.m.
Suggest removal
Mike_In_Hartsel writes:
Obama '08, disaster '08 to '12.
April 21, 2008
8:09 a.m.
Suggest removal
rickg19611 writes:
With all the cheerleading from the lunatic left media, Obama should be doing a lot better than reality proves..... Obama is trailing in must-win BLUE states like Michigan, New Jersey, Minnesota, Pennsylvania.
These are blue states that Kerry managed to win in 2004, but still lost because Americans in the rest of the country preferred Bush. If Obama can't even manage to win some blue states that Kerry carried, then he is toast. Toast by landslide margins.
Obama is shaping up to be the worst disaster in Democrat politics since..... the beginning of the Democrat party.
April 21, 2008
9:32 a.m.
Suggest removal
Spencer writes:
Don't worry rickg, once the general election begins people will realize that voting for McSame is 4 more years of the same failed Bush policies. The election will not be close, Dems will win a cake walk. Bush is the worst thing that has happened to the GOP since Nixon. Republicans controlled everything 4 years ago and screwed up completely.
April 21, 2008
9:39 a.m.
Suggest removal
rickg19611 writes:
Yeah... nice fantasy spencer....
That must be why people TODAY are all choosing McCain over Obama, even in BLUE states.
And it gets worse for Obama.... not only is he struggling to beat Hillary, every week reveals a new scandal from his unknown, secret background.
Obama's links to terrorists is the latest shocker, and he showed how weak he is when a couple of DEMOCRATS asked him about it and he collapsed in fear. He will collapse like a wet cardboard box when confronted by those who don't sugar coat the questions because they share his Democrat views.
April 21, 2008
1:15 p.m.
Suggest removal
Spencer writes:
Like I said little Ricky, wait until we have the general election. People can choose whether or not they wish to continue with 4 more years of Bush's failed policies.
April 21, 2008
2:23 p.m.
Suggest removal
rickg19611 writes:
"tomorrow will be different"....
The excuse used by Obama supporters when confronted with their sinking candidate.
The excuse used by Kerry supporters when confronted with their sinking candidate.
The excuse used by Gore supporters when confronted with their sinking candidate.
The excuse used by Dukakis supporters when confronted with their sinking candidate.
The excuse used by Mondale supporters when confronted with their sinking candidate.
The excuse used by Carter supporters when confronted with their sinking candidate.
April 21, 2008
4:36 p.m.
Suggest removal
mytwosense writes:
Clinton is not losing this race because of Obama's "money advantage." She is losing the race because of her negative tactics that are horribly reminiscent of the 2004 presidential race. She has destroyed her credibility, and the blame cannot be laid anywhere else.
April 21, 2008
9:10 p.m.
Suggest removal
arby writes:
When the big boys get together in the backroom over a bottle of JD Black and a box of illegal Cuban cigars Hill/Bill are going to get the job.