After Midnight: Obama as Cinderella in What Could Have Been a Rough Week

[DeepModem Mom]

ABC News: The Note: After Midnight
Obama as Cinderella in What Could Have Been a Rough Week.
By RICK KLEIN with MIKE ELMORE
March 21, 2008


The endorsement of Gov. Bill Richardson, D-N.M., comes as a relief to Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., who spent the last week in damage control mode, attempting to simmer the media frenzy initiated by the revelation of controversial comments made by Sen. Obama's pastor, Rev. Wright. (ABC News Photo Illustration)

Sometimes, like a Cinderella team marching through March, Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign seems nothing short of charmed. It helps that while Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has 10 weeks to make Obama totally and entirely unelectable, Obama just has to wait out the clock. But the outside help Obama is getting (some that he asked for, some that he didn't) is the X-factor -- and it means that, even as Obama grapples with perhaps the biggest challenge to his candidacy, he will be the nominee short of something else dramatic happening in the race that's already seen everything.

To survey the data points on a good Friday in Obamaland, in what had the potential to be a very rough week:

- Obama controls Friday's marquee event -- a 12:30 pm ET endorsement in Oregon by Governor/superdelegate/former Clinton Cabinet secretary/former candidate Bill Richardson, D-N.M., who provides a handy answer to the he's-not-ready argument (and who resisted the full Clinton press)....(And, for better or worse, former senator John Edwards is staying out of the fight.)

- Michigan, by not voting again, breaks Obama's way -- remember that the status quo is very good for him these days. That plus Florida means two very big states that weren't in his column will not, in all likelihood, count for anything in the delegate race.

- The timing of the Clinton library document dump means that reporters are probing Clinton's record (including every crumpet consumed on a foreign trip) at the very time the Clinton campaign wants the focus on Obama's record.

- Surely Obama didn't ask for his private information to be improperly accessed by State Department workers. But how does a story about Bush administration ineptitude (with hints of dirty tricks) not work to his benefit?

- And while his speech this week on that whole little race thing may not have put anything in his rearview mirror, Clinton is struggling for a way to do anything about it....

The controversy over Rev. Jeremiah Wright should be, for Clinton, the story that says everything -- it puts Obama in an uncomfortable race box, and the sermon clips speak for themselves. As for the long-term implications, "some voters say the revelations about Obama's 20-year relationship with Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ was a deal-breaker for them -- that there is now no way they will vote for Obama," Scott Helman and Sasha Issenberg, reporting from Indiana, write in The Boston Globe. "Others say that it would be wrong to hold Obama accountable for his pastor, or that the black anger Wright has expressed is understandable."

The Philadelphia Inquirer's Dick Polman writes that Obama's not in the clear: "His full speech text was an appeal to the intellect, but the short-hand version of this affair packs a visceral punch. Some voters will simply reduce it all to a few sentences: Why didn't Obama, upon hearing something vile or hateful, simply get up and walk out? How could Obama stick by a reverend who stands in the pulpit and says 'God damn America?'"...

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/TheNote/story?id=3105288&page=1

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