Last night I endured considerable babbling from the television pundits about Barack Obama’s first quarter fundraising results. Consensus among the bobbleheads is that all those little people who gave nickles and dimes to Sen. Obama instead of Sen. Clinton must be (a) angry with her because of the war, or (b) still suffering Clinton fatigue. Or both.I’m not going to disagree with any of that—it’s all true. However, there’s still one more reason why Obama got donations from 100,000 people or whatever it was: he’s the first truly inspiring personality (who couldn’t quickly be labeled as ‘crazy,’ anyway) since, what, Bill Clinton? JFK? There are still tons of doubts and unknowns about Obama, and I'm not really sure that I like his stances in some areas, but as I've said before...he actually has a healthy amount charisma, and he's shown that he doesn't mind being a wonky guy who learns quickly. I think he'll develop into a pretty decent candidate over the next few months. I hope he does, anyway.
I think both are a factor, but I think there’s another factor the bobbleheads are missing.
For the past few bleeping years the pundits have been telling us that Sen. Hillary Clinton will be the 2008 presidential nominee for the Democratic Party. No doubt about it. She’s got all this money, all these connections, a killer political organization — nay, a machine — behind her. Whether the Democratic Party base wanted her to be the candidate was never questioned. She was who we were going to get, like it or not.
People are tired of Hillary, and people are being tired of told that Hillary was going to be the nominee no matter what, but simply being “someone other than Hillary” isn’t why Obama raised that much, and for all his faults, it’s an insult to him to think that his own personality and qualifications didn’t have something to do with it.
|