Oh, Baby! Obama!
October 24, 2006 at 9:09 am
In case you missed the news the last three days, a quick recap: the media has coronated Barack Obama, awarding him the Democratic presidential nomination for 2008 — or. presumably whichever year works best for his schedule.
Lots of words, lots of glowing descriptions. But as captured below by Newsbusters, NBC Nightly News should get credit for at least being able to make the case most succinctly:
Bubba said,
October 24, 2006 @ 10:11 am
Senator Barack Obama, the Illinois Democrat who said Sunday that he was considering running for president in 2008, created a little sunlight on Monday between himself and both Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton.
For one thing, he said that as a youth he had inhaled.
“When I was a kid, I inhaled,” Mr. Obama said here to an audience of magazine editors. “That was the point.”
The direct admission was in contrast to Mr. Clinton’s denial in his 1992 campaign for president that he had smoked marijuana.
“I didn’t inhale,” Mr. Clinton said, cementing the idea that he liked to have things both ways.
Mr. Obama had written in his first book, “Dreams From My Father” (1995), before entering politics, that he had used marijuana and cocaine (“maybe a little blow”). He said he had not tried heroin because he did not like the pusher who was trying to sell it to him.
In an interview here on Monday conducted by David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, at a meeting of the American Society of Magazine Editors, Mr. Obama said he was not making light of the subject.
“It was reflective of the struggles and confusion of a teenage boy,” he said. “Teenage boys are frequently confused.”
Since Mr. Clinton’s statement, the question of drug use has become a standard one for politicians, sometimes as a test of their ability to be straightforward. If the politician has used drugs, conventional wisdom says it is best to try to get the question out of the way early.
Jackson Landers said,
October 24, 2006 @ 10:51 am
Obama has never been in a serious race in his life. He’s run in a single federal race where his opponent dropped out halfway through and was replaced with a hyperventilating right-winger who had never even lived in Illinois and sounded like Kermit the Frog. Of course he won with around 80% of the vote. A warm gob of spit would have gotten 80% in that race so long as it had a real Illinois mailing address. The idea that this guy has been vetted thoroughly enough or that he is capable of getting through the most intense political contest in America is totally unproven and ridiculous.
Obama will be fun to watch because he is going to crack up eventually. It’s inevitable. He just doesn’t have the experience to get through this thing. The press loves to build these guys up just watch them fall down for the sake of the drama.