Rumors are rumors are rumors ... This one doesn't seem to have all that much basis in fact -- there's a lot of tea-leaf reading going on. Still, if Obama enters the race, it makes things very interesting, doesn't it? I wonder how Hillary will respond?
Off hand, I'd say that Obama's entry would suck most of the oxygen out of the race and immediately clear the field of a bunch of non-starter candidates, like Vilsack, Richardson, Dodd, and Biden, but Hillary's got the big war chest which certainly gives her the resources she needs to make the run anyway.
I'd also say that an Obama entry will hurt Edwards significantly, since Obama will automatically take over the "feisty young buck/new hope for the nation" slot that Edwards is currently inhabiting.
As I think I've said here before, I still worry about a black man running for President in this country, but perhaps I'm wrong and this is the right time, with the voting public totally disenchanted with Bush and Cheney and Republicans in general. Maybe that will be enough to overcome prejudice and racism -- but is it really possible, at this time, to win the Presidency without winning a Southern state? (And yes, I think it is unfortunately a foregone conclusion that having an African-American as the candidate means that we will not win in the South.)
Update: A friend pointed me to the kind of stuff that the Republicans will use against Obama, and it's all very predictable -- the "Obama" card, the "Hussein" card, the Muslim card, the subtext (which they barely even bother to conceal) of his being black, all these things are going to be repeated over and over again. I hope that if Obama is planning on running, he's got a solid strategy for dealing with them, and immediately -- those kinds of scurrilous attacks will only work better and better if he doesn't kneecap them right now.
I'm sorry to say it's one of the things that concerns me about Obama running, that he provides quite a few affordances for the opposition's propaganda. Just think -- we thought that Kerry, as a war hero, was immune from the usual attacks used against Democrats as being weak sisters on defense issues, but the Republicans managed nevertheless to Swift Boat him in just that area. The Rove/Atwater technique is not to nibble around the edges, but go after their opponent's central attribute and attack it hard -- with Obama, that's just going to be so much easier, because of his names, his background and the fact that he's black.
That doesn't (and shouldn't) disqualify Obama from running, but it does give me concern. He's not likely to face that kind of vicious attack from fellow Democrats in the campaign for the nomination, so he may think that he doesn't have to deal with it until after he wraps it up, but he would be wrong -- he's got to deal with it right away so his counter-framing has time to become established and familiar.
Update: A friend of mine points out that Obama wrote an autobiography in which he talked about Kenya and his partial Muslim education, and so on, partly for the purpose of preparing for the kind of attacks that are represented by the link above. That's certainly true, but writing a book about it won't cut the mustard in terms of countering what's going to be out there in the wingnut blogosphere, on right-wing talk radio, on the pundit shows and in the mainstream media (which will inevitably take it up in the guise of reporting about the "controversy"). You can't just say that stuff once in a medium which isn't going to reach a lot of the people it needs to reach, you have to say it over and over and over again, just as the attacks will be made repeatedly, and you have to say it in words of one syllable in places that people will be exposed to it with regularity, until it (perhaps) has diluted and counter the charges.
That's why the idea of announcing on Oprah (if that's what he does), however treacly and sentimental it may get, is not only a fantastic idea in and of itself, since the clip will be shown on every possible program and on the Net, it's also a irreplaceable opportunity to hit back at the right-wing attacks on a show that real people actually watch. If he is going to announce on Oprah, I hope that every second word out of his mouth is one that counters those attacks, so that when they show the moment (as they will, over and over and over again) those countering explanations cannot be sliced away from the announcement by editors looking for the tightest possible sound bite.
[Thanks to Polly]
Update: The indispensible Snopes.com covers the Obama canard here.
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Thanks to: Breeze, Chuck, Ivan Raikov, Kaiju, Kathy, Roger, Shirley, S.M. Dixon
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by Joel Pelletier
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recent listening
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J.R.R. Tolkien
"2001: A Space Odyssey"
Kurt Vonnegut
Yes
Bullshit, trolling, unthinking knee-jerk dogmatism and the drivel of idiots will be ruthlessly deleted and the posters banned.
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the story so far
unfutz: toiling in almost complete obscurity for almost 1500 days
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