Barack Obama: The Teflon Candidate?
Newsmax notes that Obama’s poll numbers don’t seem to be dipping despite his campaign being plagued with this laundry list of gaffes and scandal.
# Obama flip-flopped on his pledge to spurn private contributions and finance his campaign publicly, as long as his opponent did likewise. McCain said he’s willing and Obama flipped and said he’s not.
# The Democratic candidate was caught flat footed by the sudden spike in oil prices and even defended their high level, lamenting only that we had not been given a period of time to make a “gradual adjustment” to the higher price.
# McCain urged offshore drilling, which Americans support, according to Rasmussen’s polling, by 70-19, while Obama said no.
# Obama urged that we give foreign terror suspects constitutional rights, including habeas corpus, and even implied that if we caught bin Laden, that’s how he should be treated.
# The head of the commission Obama set up to vet vice presidential candidates, Jim Johnson, had to resign after he obtained millions in sweetheart loans from Countrywide, the mortgage giant that is at the heart of the subprime scandal.
So is Obama’s appeal so great that these troubling realities don’t matter? Not really. I think Obama’s poll numbers have yet to take a hit for two reasons:
First, and foremost, most Americans are not the sort of political junkies most journalists, bloggers and blog readers are. They don’t follow primary races. They don’t read Daily Kos and/or the Drudge Report daily. So, for the most part, they don’t really know about Barack Obama and all his problems.
Second, Barack Obama has the fawning support of the press corps. They’re not going to go out of the way to beat Obama up over these embarrassments in the same way they would a Republican, for instance.
But make no doubt about it: Obama will get his. He’s not going to skate into the White House. He’s too far to the left, and he’s got a long history of associating himself with people who are even further to the left. He is, essentially, running for Jimmy Carter’s second term. America got fed up with Carter and booted him after one term in office. They’ll do the same to Obama too, if he even manages to get into office.
