Michael Barone has crunched the numbers, and come up with this conclusion:
It’s a little dangerous in interpreting polls to assume that voters’ thinking proceeds along logical lines. People who aren’t professionally involved in politics, whose knowledge comes from bits and snippets of news, can hold beliefs that are contradictory or in tension with each other. They don’t feel obliged to resolve contradictions. But even granting that, it seems to me that about half of West Virginia and Kentucky Democratic primary voters were saying that Obama lied about not knowing what Wright has been preaching and that he agrees with him a lot more than he has let on.
Now West Virginia and Kentucky are not typical primary states. They, together with Arkansas, where Hillary Clinton was First Lady for 12 years, were Obama’s weakest states in this year’s primaries. And some percentage of registered Democrats in these states have been voting Republican in recent presidential elections. Nevertheless, the negative verdict these voters render on Obama’s honesty and his relationship with Wright is likely to be typical of some significant quantum of potential Democratic voters this year. And not just in states like West Virginia and Kentucky, which he will certainly lose, but in marginal states which he must carry in order to be elected.
I find confirmation from this in a recent focus group conducted for the Annenberg Public Policy Center by pollster Peter Hart (for whom I worked for seven years) of non-primary voters in Charlottesville, Va. As Hart and Alex Horowitz note in their analysis of reactions to Obama, “When asked to recount any two memories of the total presidential campaign so far, seven of the 12 participants cite Rev. Wright by name. So far, clips of Rev. Wright clearly are the one ‘key defining moment’ of this campaign.”
Most reporters are liberals, whose circles of friends and acquaintances have included people with views not dissimilar to those of Wright or William Ayers, the unrepentant Weather Underground bomber with whom Obama served on a nonprofit board and at whose house his state Senate candidacy was launched. Such reporters don’t find these views utterly repugnant or particularly noteworthy. But most American voters do. And they wonder whether a candidate who associates with such people agrees with them — or disbelieve him when he says he doesn’t.
Though most in the press won’t admit it, that’s a problem — for the Obama candidacy and for the whole Democratic party once it nominates him.
I think Obama’s people – as well as other leading Democrats – understand this far better than the MSM or Obama’s supporters do; thus the recent talking point that the Wright issue is pretty much out of bounds, plus absurd attempts to make the Hagee issue equivalent to the Wright issue (this AP story from today is typical of the “Hagee is the same as Wright” meme). As for the dishonesty people see in Obama – that is clear; it was an absurd lie on the part of Obama to state that he was unaware of Wright’s extremist views…everyone knows it is a lie, he knew it was a lie as he uttered it…and yet he said it, and now a large portion of the people have put down Obama as a liar. Hard to get out from under that.
Fundamentally, Democrats are forced into dishonesty because they know their policies are rejected by the broad majority of the American people – they can’t run explicitly on American weakness and kowtowing to the UN…so they talk about the need for diplomacy, as if we hadn’t been using diplomacy with great success these past 7 years (the growing alliance with India, the agreement to build SDI in Europe, the voluntary termination of Libya’s nuclear program, eg). They can’t run explicitly on high taxes…so they talk about “middle class tax cuts” and making the rich pay more. They can’t run explicitly on federally funded abortion on demand…so they talk about securing the right for women to “choose” regardless of ability to pay. On and on it goes – never saying what they really want to do…and this has bred the culture of dishonesty which convinced Obama, seemingly, that a rather stupid and bald-faced lie about Wright would go down smoothly. Well, it hasn’t – and it may cost Obama the election.
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