Meh. The media is playing up the spat because they love good drama. First of all, they quote an absolute falsehood right in the lede: "almost half of Clinton supporters tell pollsters that they will not vote for Obama." Well, that was true -- in MAY. The most recent polls put Obama as consolidating 70-80% of the Hillary supporters behind him.
More interesting, I thought was this insight over at MyDD. Todd Beeton (himself an ardent Clintonista this spring) writes:
Yesterday I wrote that I suspected that Barack Obama was losing left-leaning independents by sounding more and more like a Republican, but as I look at the latest Quinnipiac poll, which shows Obama with a 9 point lead, I wonder if I'm missing the point of Obama's strategy here. We're all tempted to look at political maneuvering on a left-right continuum, hence the knee-jerk "move to the center" meme, and now that Obama's reiterating his commitment to ending the war, we're tempted to say, phew, OK, he's not abandoning us. But maybe, just maybe it's not about us (and by "us" I mean "the left.")
Barack Obama built a coalition in the primary based on demographics rather than ideology. Sure he had a virtual monopoly on the progressive activist left but it wasn't because he was running as a liberal, rather he'd coalesced the demographic groups that largely make up the progressive movement: young, educated, upwardly mobile, urban...
So now I look at Quinnipiac's analysis of the results of its poll and it hits me, Obama's strategy isn't about playing to a liberal base versus a conservative base or some mushy middle in between, rather he's more concerned with consolidating the demographic bases he knows he can win this election with
A new way of looking at it, and given Obama's very clever approach to the election so far, entirely plausible that they're pursuing such a strategy deliberately.
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Meh. The media is playing up the spat because they love good drama. First of all, they quote an absolute falsehood right in the lede: "almost half of Clinton supporters tell pollsters that they will not vote for Obama." Well, that was true -- in MAY. The most recent polls put Obama as consolidating 70-80% of the Hillary supporters behind him.
More interesting, I thought was this insight over at MyDD. Todd Beeton (himself an ardent Clintonista this spring) writes:
Yesterday I wrote that I suspected that Barack Obama was losing left-leaning independents by sounding more and more like a Republican, but as I look at the latest Quinnipiac poll, which shows Obama with a 9 point lead, I wonder if I'm missing the point of Obama's strategy here. We're all tempted to look at political maneuvering on a left-right continuum, hence the knee-jerk "move to the center" meme, and now that Obama's reiterating his commitment to ending the war, we're tempted to say, phew, OK, he's not abandoning us. But maybe, just maybe it's not about us (and by "us" I mean "the left.")
Barack Obama built a coalition in the primary based on demographics rather than ideology. Sure he had a virtual monopoly on the progressive activist left but it wasn't because he was running as a liberal, rather he'd coalesced the demographic groups that largely make up the progressive movement: young, educated, upwardly mobile, urban...
So now I look at Quinnipiac's analysis of the results of its poll and it hits me, Obama's strategy isn't about playing to a liberal base versus a conservative base or some mushy middle in between, rather he's more concerned with consolidating the demographic bases he knows he can win this election with
A new way of looking at it, and given Obama's very clever approach to the election so far, entirely plausible that they're pursuing such a strategy deliberately.
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