The Philadelphia story
Obama didn't do well in his televised debate in Philadelphia last night with Hillary Clinton. He did okay, and he didn't hurt himself, but Clinton had the upper hand through much of the evening. That may fan fears as to how well he will handle both Sen. John McCain and the expected rightwing "character" onslaught in the fall. You can expect a lot of what passed for debate last night to appear in McCain ads and "independent" ads from groups allied to McCain or the movement conservative cause.
ABC News has come in for some serious criticism for how its anchors--Charles Gibson and George Stephanopolous--handed the event, namely their focus on titillating issues that are of little importance to picking the best candidate. We had a repeat of the "bitter small town" controversy, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright controversy, and even Obama's having shared room air with Bill Ayers, a long ago Weather Underground radical. I suspect less than one percent of the viewing audience even knew who Ayers was. I did, but I grew up in the 1960s and followed radical politics from a distance.
Obama supposedly was deliberately not mixing it up with Hillary, although he did get in a couple of zingers. He reminded viewers that Hillary, at the beginning of the first Clinton Administration, made a comment that many found as troublesome as the "bitter small towns" remark, namely the one about how she went off to be a lawyer rather than "stay home and bake cookies." And he pointed out, which I didn't know, that President Clinton had pardoned two former members of the SDS/Weather Underground.
These are distractions, folks. We need the candidates to address real issues, not respond to rightwing efforts to demonize people who fought for civil rights or an end to the Vietnam War forty years ago. McCain can't stop talking about Clinton's "earmark" of funds for the Woodstock Museum. I'm glad she tried to bring federal funds to that project. It sounds fascinating, and I'll take my family to visit it when it opens. So will a lot of other Americans. I'm sorry McCain missed Woodstock because he was a POW in North Vietnam, as he likes to point out. But let's be really frank here. What does getting shot down over Hanoi and spending time in prison really prove as far as your ability to be a good President?
But I digress. The polls, so far, show Clinton with an increasingly narrow edge over Obama in the Pennsylvania primary next Tuesday. Obama continues to lead Clinton by more than 10 points among all voters.