First, if you’re wondering what I as a Hillary supporter think about Hillary’s decision to continue running after yesterday, the answer is I don’t know what I think of it as a strategy.  Naturally I would like to believe that she could still somehow prevail.  I am not sanguine.  People are speculating that she is now running for the VP slot.  We’ll see. 

But — and this matters more to me — I most definitely admire her for her unswerving commitment to see the process through.  Despite the pissing and moaning in the media, and whatever the outcome, I predict that the day will certainly arrive when people will look back with awe and amazement at  Hillary’s insistence in going the distance against all odds and wish that they had chosen her.  She is indomitable.  I like that in a Democrat and so should other Democrats.  Alas, many of them are so beguiled by the media myths about Hillary that they just can’t see what a force of nature she really is.  

Obama could learn a lot from her and he’d be a better (future) president for it.  Instead, I imagine we’ll be stuck with him in his current incarnation — all rhetoric, all the time.   

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So was it a home run or not? Was Democratic Senator Barack Obama’s historical racial division speech — delivered due to the continuing political firestorm over his relationship with his controversial family pastor Jeremiah Wright Jr but containing one of the most thoughtful discussions of the racial issue ever uttered by a modern politician — a success or a flop?

Much of it is in the eye of the beholder. (You can watch the whole speech here.)

The reason: although generally acknowledged to be a historical speech in terms of content and importance, in hard-nosed political terms its success will eventually be judged by whether he reached his target audience. So watch the polls…and the primaries.

His target audience would NOT be:
–Conservative talk show hosts. On the radio yesterday Bill O’Reilly told listeners Obama could NOT really be a uniter — because he had dared to boycott the Fox Presidential debates. (Ohhhkayy…..). Meanwhile, on his Fox News evening show, Sean Hannity was again raising the name of Louis Farrakhan and seemingly trying to link Obama with him — as he has done before.

–Republican activists on and off the web who area looking for vulnerabilities — any vulnerabilities — to use against him in the general election if he gets the nomination. It’s like the old Groucho Marx song lyric: “Whatever it is, I’m against it…”

His target audience WOULD BE (and these are just a few):
–Independent voters who are truly swing voters and showed great interest in Obama in the past. The Pastor’s comments have already had a bad impact on Obama, a CBS poll finds:

Sixty-one percent of independent voters say they are unaffected, but 36 percent said it made their view less favorable. Two percent of independents said it made them more favorable view.

Overall, unfavorable views of Obama are up somewhat from February. His favorable ratings remain largely unchanged at 44 percent, but there has been some movement from undecided views to unfavorable views, from 23 percent in February to 30 percent now.

–Superdelegates. Too early to tell. They’ll be watching the remaining primaries and polls to see if Obama self-destructs. They’ll also likely watch to see how he handles himself under intense fire…that is sure to come in coming weeks.
–White working class Americans. The impact here is problematical. Most working class Americans didn’t see the speech live, and it’s unlikely a larger number of them turned to C-SPAN or the web to see it in its entirety. As many analysts noted, the speech was “nuanced” and highly thoughtful. In fact, his passages about the way America politics operates in attack mode echoed what many independent voters have said for years. Most working Americans will get their take on what he said via TV sound bites — which are usually the most dramatic. In a “nuanced” speech, that could prove perilous.

The likely impact? It’s too early to tell — but it’s likely more footage of Wright will be shown and hammered via clips by Obama’s foes, particularly Republican. (Why should Hillary Clinton intervene at all when Obama is now being lambasted by GOPers and press coverage?).

But it’s clear the issue won’t go away, that Republicans were smiling yesterday, Newsday notes:

Barack Obama’s first major speech on race drew praise for its eloquence Tuesday — but Republicans think he handed them a major weapon by refusing to disown family pastor Jeremiah Wright Jr., who is known for racially inflammatory remarks.

“This is far and away the most damaging issue of the campaign for him, and his wonderful speech did nothing to make it go away,” said Whit Ayres, a longtime Republican pollster.

In the middle of a recession an economic slowdown (we’ll use White House terminology here), the war in Iraq and various other problems, it’s clear Republicans see an issue they can hammer home. The election could be about Obama and his pastor and his refusal to totally disown him:

“I think it’s an obligation of any opponent to use this issue, to make Reverend Wright a centerpiece of the campaign,” said Rep. Peter King (R-Seaford).

“His speech was disappointing and shameful,” King added. ” … This goes to the heart of who Barack Obama is. He’s trying to say he represents the 21st-century view on race and here he’s sticking up for this guy.”

Added pollster Ayres: “The problem is the contradiction between the fundamental message of the Obama campaign about bringing America together and Wright’s hate-filled, divisive message.”

So the most likely conclusions could be this:
(1) The speech will go down in history as one of the most nuanced and thoughtful discussions by a politician about race in decades.
(2) Future polls will prove hard evidence of what the impact is on the groups Obama needs to reach.
(3) Conservative talk radio, Fox News, and many weblogs that already vehemently oppose Obama were never in the target audience but can be expected to return to this issue repeatedly (as new clips will inevitably arise).
(4) If this issue starts to hurt Obama, Clinton will use this to argue that it’s too huge a risk to give him the nomination and that for the good of the party Superdelegates should vote for someone else (her).

The Washington Post:

Obama needed to address several audiences with the speech: undecided white voters in Pennsylvania, whose Rust Belt cousins Obama struggled to win over in Ohio even before the Wright controversy; African Americans aggrieved by the opprobrium being heaped on Wright; and staunch supporters such as Farley who needed reassurance about their candidate.

And the likely impact?

The speech drew praise across the political spectrum, though some on the right questioned Obama’s assertion that his liberal agenda could unite different races. But many who heard the speech wondered whether it would be enough to calm the anger generated by the Wright videos. Gerald Shuster, a political scientist at the University of Pittsburgh, found the speech “stylistically persuasive” but thought Obama should have moved aggressively to distance himself from Wright months ago, when reports of his harsher sermons first surfaced. “The rhetoric is convincing, but it’s just coming too late,” he said.

Martin Medhurst, an expert in rhetoric at Baylor University, was struck by the religious intonations as well as the echoes of John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech on his Catholicism, particularly the summons to overcome divisions to confront common threats.

Will yesterday’s speech be remembered along with Kennedy’s? “If Obama goes on to win the presidency, it will,” Medhurst said. “If he wins the presidency, this will be seen as a very important speech.”

The question is whether the bulk of voters will be able to find the entire speech or watch significant parts of it and listen to his discussion on race, its role, how it impacts perceptions, how existing politics always works and his call for a newer style. Or, whether the focus will remain on Wright as a hot-button issue — that eventually could sink him.

Here’s a prediction:

Parts of the speech may be read to students in future generations.

And parts of the speech will be read and used by Republican operatives.

Looking at it in purely political terms, is the Obama campaign ready for what is most assuredly going to come?

HERE’S A CROSS-SECTION OF VIEWPOINTS FROM MANY DIFFERENT WEBLOGS ON THIS HISTORICAL SPEECH

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Question: Which is the craziest?

a) John McCain claiming that Obama is all about “the past” on Iraq.
b) Bill O’Reilly equating Arianna Huffington with the Nazis and the KKK.
c) Rush Limbaugh defending the “Husseinization” of Obama.
d) Mahmoud Ahmadinejad calling Iran the world’s #1 power.

I’ll go with b) and d) — a tie. McCain’s claim is just silly, while Limbaugh’s defence of the predictable Republican smear is, well, predictably stupid. Both O’Reilly and Ahmadinejad, however, are nuts.

**********

Speaking of the “Husseinization” of Obama — and I wrote the other day about how the Republican Smear Machine (RSM) will portray Obama as a black Muslim terrorist — one of the bigger right-wing bloggers, Pamela of Atlas Shrugs, is already on the bigoted offensive: “My objective is to unearth Obama’s relationship to Islam. Islam is a political ideology and it is incompatible with democracy.”

Actually, Islam is a religion, a faith, just like Judaism or Christianity, and, of course, Christianity has a long and decidedly anti-democratic history. (Yes, she’s that ignorant.) But no matter. Her real objective is clearly to smear the entirety of the Muslim religion, and all Muslims, and to argue that Obama is a terrorist, or at least a friend to terrorists.
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Last week’s Chelsea Clinton furor marks a low point in cable network competition for eyeballs and ears during the 24/7 news cycle and raises broader questions about their prime-time “journalism,” which has degenerated into a babble of idiot ids vying for attention.

David Shuster’s “pimped out” remark exemplifies a trend reported almost a year ago by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, that “cable news channels…are moving more toward personalities, often opinionated ones, to win audiences.

“The most strident voices, such as Keith Olbermann and Glenn Beck, are among the biggest successes in winning viewers, as is CNN’s new crusader, Lou Dobbs. How much those individual shows affect a channel’s overall audience is harder to gauge. Their growth in 2006 was substantial, particularly among 25-to-54-year-olds, but those gains were not enough to stanch the overall declines.

“The shifts toward even edgier opinion are also probably a response to another change. Cable is beginning to lose its claim as the primary destination for what was once its main appeal: news on demand. That is something the Internet can now provide more efficiently.”

Something even more basic is involved as well…

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A heated confrontation (what else on TVpolitical talk shows?) between Fox News talk powerhouse Bill O’Reilly and Democratic Senator Chris Dodd over O’Reilly’s latest rage campaign, this time against the YearlyKos convention and Daily Kos (O’Reilly uses the graphic to suggest the whole site is like that).

But this time someone finally NAILS IT. Chris Dodd cuts to it and notes what O’Reilly is really doing and what is really bugging him. Note also that O’Reilly also denies he made comments bout Al Qaeda and San Francisco, which were well covered on blogs when he made them (a reminder of that is HERE). Watch it, listen to Dodd’s comments even when O’Reilly tries to talk over him.

But this is GOOD TELEVISION which is why O’Reilly should also be seen as a canny showman who understands what gets ratings in 21st century America:

TMV thanks Americablog for the tip.

Blogging is definitely starting to come of age politically — to the extent where the Washington Post calls the YearlyKos convention the Democratic party’s other convention.

But the Post also notes that there is also tricky part for Democratic politicians who decide to bond with bloggers as well:

Last month, in a straw poll on the popular liberal blog Daily Kos, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), the front-runner for her party’s presidential nomination, won only 9 percent of the vote, lagging far behind former senator John Edwards (N.C.) with 36 percent and Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) with 27 percent. She couldn’t make it past 4 percent for most of the year.

But as the who’s who of the progressive blogosphere — the “Net roots” — gather in Chicago for the YearlyKos convention, which started yesterday, Clinton will be there. Her attendance underscores two seemingly contradictory realities: blogs’ growing influence as powerful backroom players in Democratic circles and the fact that they don’t reflect the views of most Democrats, much less the general public.

“The fact is, the Net roots cannot win elections by ourselves,” Markos “Kos” Moulitsas Zúniga, founder of Daily Kos and the namesake of the event, said this week. “But we can be a key component to a winning Democratic strategy.”

Zuniga’s comment indicates he is much more the hard-nosed political realist than some of his critics on the right paint him to be.

And this convention will not always contain the name of the Kos website:

The convention’s chief organizer is not Kos but Gina Cooper, a former high school teacher who became a Net-roots activist and borrowed Moulitsas’s nickname to inaugurate the conference last year. Next year it will have another name.

“This event is much larger than any one blog,” Cooper explained, “though we’re all a fan of Kos and certainly not distancing ourselves from his blog.”

And, indeed, it’s a smarter move to do so. The convention is gaining importance in terms of perceived clout — to the extent where Fox talk show star Bill O’Reilly blasted it and Democrats to who go there (but then O’Reilly is blasting Democratic candidates who dare chat with any liberal groups he doesn’t like ). The importance of progressive weblogs goes beond one weblog (the same holds for blogs in the center and on the right).

And the ascention of progressive weblogs can be seen in a tantilizing fact noted earlier in many news reports: Democratic candidates have flocked to be seen at the YearlyKos convention at the same time as they scrambled to avoid going to recent centrist Democratic Leadership Council get together.

What does that mean? Does it mean:

–The Democratic party’s authentic “center” has now swung to the left?

–Disgust over President George Bush, the Iraq war, and the intentional polarization of American politics made the DLC seem to be too much akin to cooperating with “the enemy?”

–The perception that the DLC had some clout is largely gone now due to the nature of both the 2006 election results and polls that show increasing ire among Democrats over the performance of Democrats in Congress who are perceived as not being tough enough?

–All of the above?

Regardless, bloggers are increasingly seen by campaigns as being people who can help raise money for candidates, help get the message out (particularly through these “blogger conference calls” candidates in both parties hold that should more aptly be called “friendly bloggers conference calls” since only perceived blogging buds are invited), and help recruit campaign workers.

The dangers for candidates: convention bloggers can be cranky (Hillary Clinton as just found this out) — and their ideas (and demands) may not be the ideas that can help win in a general election but could turn off some voters. Bloggers on both sides tend to be uncompromising.

The trick for candidates: use blogs as a useful component but don’t forget that elections can’t be won unless centrist and independent voters are wooed and convinced. And right now polls show those voters heavily flowing to the Democrats.

UPDATE:
– A conservative blogger attending the convention for Pajamas Media comes away with a different view then he might have had than if he unquestioningly believed Bill O’Reilly.
–Thoughts on the convention from the always independent The Gun Toting Liberal.

This time it’s aimed at what he calls a 16 year old high school “pinhead” (the one, obviously, who he disagrees with and who energetically challenged him).

You can watch the video, read a post with original reporting on what was reportedly said to the student who challenged O’Reilly before he went on the air — and then decide yourself by CLICKING HERE.

PS: O’Reilly is a real showman. But make sure you read the post before you watch the video. Also, note how at the end O’Reilly attempts to end the segment in a condescending way that puts down the 16-year-old “pinhead” — but the “pinhead” gets in the last word.

Hopefully both students won’t confuse a short talk show discussion aimed promoting “high concept” controversy and negative labelling as a thoughtful discussion of a controversial issue.

But we think they’re smarter than their elders elder.

UPDATE: President Bush also got some unsolicited policy advice from high schoolers. (They’re apparently also what B.O. would call “pinheads.”)

The DNC proves that it can be just as dishonest as - what Hillary Clinton calls - “the right wing noise machine.” Today, the DNC published a post about John McCain (with video). The DNC presents it as follows:

McCain Agrees We Need a Cap To Maintain “White, Christian, Male Power Structure”

Near the end of the video, there was this exchange:

Bill O’Reilly: But do you understand what the New York Times wants, and the far-left want? They want to break down the white, Christian, male power structure, which you’re a part, and so am I, and they want to bring in millions of foreign nationals to basically break down the structure that we have. In that regard, Pat Buchanan is right. So I say you’ve got to cap with a number.

John McCain: In America today we’ve got a very strong economy and low unemployment, so we need addition farm workers, including by the way agriculture, but there may come a time where we have an economic downturn, and we don’t need so many.

[crosstalk]

O’Reilly: But in this bill, you guys have got to cap it. Because estimation is 12 million, there may be 20 [million]. You don’t know, I don’t know. We’ve got to cap it.

McCain: We do, we do. I agree with you.

Now, O’Reilly is an idiot, make no mistake about it. O’Reilly is a racist, O’Reilly has no idea how to conduct a civilized debate, Americans should ignore whatever it is O’Reilly says, and it is quite typical for him to say something like that.

However… continue reading this.