Barack Obama lost the debate on Wednesday, badly. There was a ton of negative discussion about him and his associates, but almost no punches landed on Hillary Clinton.
It may seem to some as though the debate was lopsided toward Clinton, and Obama was simply getting the harder questions, but this is simply untrue. After the gaffe Obama made in San Francisco over the weekend, it was unavoidable for him to get negative attention.
His problem was that he just couldn’t explain this stuff away at the debate, something he has been wholly unable to do for almost a week. This may be because he won’t disavow the comments.
But when the Rev. Jeremiah Wright scandal hit, he managed, with a great speech on race, to turn the table on that controversy. Maybe he’s just tired. He looked it. Clinton was certainly more in the zone than him Wednesday night.
What Obama should have said was what he really thinks. A very thoughtful column appeared in the New York Times by Bob Herbert on Tuesday, suggesting that Obama really meant working class voters will not vote for him because he is black.
Reading between the lines in Obama’s comments, Herbert wrote that when Obama said people “cling” to “antipathy to people who aren’t like them,” this is exactly what he meant.
But if Obama addresses this, he could be attacking his own electability, which now looks like Clinton’s biggest argument against him.
There were also other scandalous reports mentioned in the debate. Obama’s association with members of the far left group the Weather Underground came up. These guys were responsible for a spate of bombings at government buildings during the Vietnam War.
He did manage to make the point, though, that Bill Clinton actually pardoned two of these activists, but hey… Bill was a draft-dodger.
Clinton wasn’t entirely without negative moments. When asked how she would respond to an Iranian invasion of Israel, she said with “massive retaliation.” What could this mean? Nuclear bombs?
This sounds a little hard-handed for a hypothetical. Obama simply said the attack would be “unacceptable.”
If he cannot weather these attacks far better than he did on Wednesday, Obama will be in trouble during the general election. But this doesn’t mean Clinton is more electable.
In the general election the Republicans would attack both her and her husband, and against the wealth of policy they have both put in place. Obama has inexperience to thank for this, which could also be a weakness, but maybe not as big of a weakness as experience.
The Republicans would be far less likely to politely tie their hands and refrain from mentioning the biggest gaffe of them all, Bill’s time in the Oval Office with some cigars and a woman named Monica.