U.S. Senator Barack Obama is set to launch a minute-long TV ad that will begin airing tomorrow in 18 states. The ad clearly aims to reintroduce (or, for those who haven't been paying attention, introduce) the presumptive Democratic nominee to voters in an attempt to define himself before smears and pernicious rumors take hold. But what is most interesting here is not the content of the ad, but rather the states in which the Obama campaign has chosen to air it. Check out the maps below to get a sense of the significance.
First, here is a map showing what NDN believes to be the core Democratic and Republican states colored blue and red respectively, of course.
Now here is the same map with an added layer showing the states in which Obama will be airing the ad.
And of course you should take a look at the ad itself:
The map is a bit
The map is a bit premature.
Obama's ad came out as a preemptive defense against what he knows is coming his way: stark and factual critism from the McCain camp about his elite background and his lack of minority empathy.
Now before you get all huffy and defensive, there are some real and startling problems for Obama in this area. Most notably is the Chicago election where he exterminated four minority progressive candidates by combing over each and every signature in their petitions for flaws in addresses etc. He ran unopposed:
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"The day after New Year's 1996, operatives for Barack Obama filed into a barren hearing room of the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners.
There they began the tedious process of challenging hundreds of signatures on the nominating petitions of state Sen. Alice Palmer, the longtime progressive activist from the city's South Side. And they kept challenging petitions until every one of Obama's four Democratic primary rivals was forced off the ballot.
Fresh from his work as a civil rights lawyer and head of a voter registration project that expanded access to the ballot box, Obama launched his first campaign for the Illinois Senate saying he wanted to empower disenfranchised citizens.
But in that initial bid for political office, Obama quickly mastered the bare-knuckle arts of Chicago electoral politics. His overwhelming legal onslaught signaled his impatience to gain office, even if that meant elbowing aside an elder stateswoman like Palmer.
A close examination of Obama's first campaign clouds the image he has cultivated throughout his political career: The man now running for president on a message of giving a voice to the voiceless first entered public office not by leveling the playing field, but by clearing it.
Source
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This article will be played up time and again as soon as Obama is made the actual nominee, presuming he will be in August against the still-running but suspended Hillary Clinton. The most troubling part of it for Obama is that in addition to being a poor little rich boy, he is blatantly borrowing the persona of the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by day but moonlighting as a minority suppressor. In short he is a hypocrite. There is no good way to look at what he did in the article from the Chicago Tribune. He will have no legitmate answer for it and it will harm him with minorities in his base, women (the elder Stateswoman he rubbed out of office), young people from shattered trust, older people....who else does that leave?
This will all come out in September, in addition to his lack of foreign experience in time of war against a seasoned veteran like McCain.
I don't want to rain on your parade but if you want to see a democrat in the Oval Office this next January, you might want to visit the link above and take a second to mull over what we should urge superdelegates to do this August.
It ain't looking good for Obama now and the GOP/Big Media haven't even warmed up their engines yet...
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