The Pheonix’s Steven Stark looks at Barack Obama’s campaign and as some suggestions.
Here’s the opening of his must-read piece:
The press — or some of it — at least some of it have put Barack Obama on the road to oblivion. When the candidate responded, at the July 23 CNN/YouTube Democratic debate, that he would meet with rogue foreign leaders during his first year in office, much of the media excoriated him — even though his statement was met with applause, and a subsequent poll showed a large majority of Democratic voters agreed with him. Michael Goodwin of the New York Daily News even wrote recently that Obama “is starting to get that last call feeling. He has to know his presidential campaign is running out of time.â€
Yet Obama’s not nearly in as bad shape as the press suggests. Yes, Hillary Clinton has a substantial lead in the national polls, but Obama isn’t far off her heels in several of the opening states that count — Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. Further, he’s sitting on a ton of cash and has a large institutional base of support in the black community. Write him off at your peril.
Nevertheless, it wouldn’t hurt for Obama to make some mid-course corrections as we head into the fall campaign. Here are three suggestions:
Read is entire column to find out the details.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.