Poll: How much is Oprah’s endorsement worth to Obama? Update: New polls show Obama surging?

posted at 2:30 pm on December 11, 2007 by Allahpundit
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Compare and contrast. It’s not so much O-mentum as no-mentum. Advantage: The Hammer.

Big bursting bombshell at Politico, meanwhile: Barack Obama is, or was, a rather doctrinaire liberal. “You mean the same guy who wants to aggressively negotiate with Iran?” you say. One and the same, my friends.

When Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) was seeking state office a dozen years ago, he took unabashedly liberal positions: flatly opposed to capital punishment, in support of a federal single-payer health plan, against any restrictions on abortion, and in support of state laws to ban the manufacture, sale and even possession of handguns…

A week after Politico provided the questionnaire to the Obama campaign for comment, an aide called Monday night to say that Obama had said he did not fill out the form, and provided a contact for his campaign manager at the time, who said she filled it out. It includes first-person comments such as: “I have not previously been a candidate.”

Obama, who makes an issue of his opponents’ consistency in the presidential race, has tempered many of those 1996 views during his quick rise to the pinnacle of American politics. He now takes less dogmatic positions many of those hot-button issues — in the view of some Democrats, he abandoned the stands as he rose through the ranks.

Note the assertion near the end by the GOP strategist that no old-school liberal in the Obama mode has won an election since Jimmeh. True, but Obama’s appeal is such that his policies are almost beside the point. He’s running on charm, an irresistible race-transcendent narrative, and the squishy, quasi-messianic promise of “change.” Throw him in there against another guy whose policies are beside the point, like Huck, and why not vote for him?

Update: Case in point, which I guess destroys the logic of my Drudge post this morning: “Not that what one blogger thinks matters that much, but if Huckabee gets the nomination, I’m voting Democratic.”

He won’t really, though. None of us will.

Update: The logic of “anyone but Hillary” is also crumbling. Political Wire says a poll out this afternoon will show the Messiah even at last in South Carolina, and Steve Sherman notes some intriguing movement at InTrade. An Obama/Huckabee election. The atheist’s dream.

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