Obama: Has he won over the skeptics?

Barack Obama has filled “a bloody tall order,” said John Heilemann in New York. To win November’s presidential election, he must overcome the doubts of the working-class whites who think he is too inexperienced, too elitist, and too black. Last week, addressing a massive audience of 40 million who tuned in to his speech at the Democratic National Convention, Obama answered all the key questions raised about his candidacy, making a “concrete, compelling, and thematically coherent” case for voters to choose him over John McCain. With a moving account of his mother’s struggles as a single parent and her family’s working-class roots in Kansas, Obama filled in the details of his uplifting personal biography, and connected himself solidly to the American mainstream. He laid out detailed plans for helping struggling Americans, including a middle-class tax cut, and very much came across “as a plausible president of the United States.”

Most important of all, said David Remnick in The New Yorker, Obama took the attack to McCain and the Republicans, forcefully blowing away the caricature that he’s an aloof, airy elitist. After indignantly recounting Republican failures such as Iraq, Katrina, and growing income inequality, Obama thundered, “I say to the people of America, to Democrats and Republicans and independents across this great land—enough! This moment—this election—is our chance to keep, in the 21st century, the American promise alive.”

It wasn’t a total home run, but Obama clearly swayed some voters, said David Paul Kuhn in Politico.com. A few days after the speech, several polls found that Obama had gotten a five-point “bounce,” and, according to Gallup, was leading McCain 50 percent to 42 percent. By the standards of some past conventions, though, that’s not a major bounce, and the polls had yet to register McCain’s expected post-convention surge in support.

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Here’s betting that Obama “can’t close the sale,” said Al Hubbard and Noam Neusner in The Wall Street Journal. Americans “aren’t sheep,” and they can sense—despite Obama’s best efforts to disguise it—that he’s very much a conventional liberal. He thinks diplomacy will solve our problems with China, Iran, and Russia. He concedes that government can’t solve all our problems, but then proposes national health insurance and a host of other programs funded by massive new taxes on “investors, business owners, and the ‘wealthy.’” So much for the “post-partisan” candidate, said Michael Gerson in The Washington Post. Obama now has completed his transformation into a “full-blooded, Bush-baiting, McCain-bashing, class-warfare candidate”—the ideological heir of Al Gore and John Kerry. With his speech last week, “he chose to lead his party into battle under the white flag of his own tonal surrender.”

You’re forgetting one thing, said The Washington Post in an editorial. Obama’s policy proposals may be familiar, but the nominee isn’t. This year’s Democratic nominee is one of the most charismatic politicians to come along in generations. The fact that he’d be our nation’s first African-American president only adds to the palpable excitement over his candidacy. That’s why Obama so depresses Republicans, said Frank Rich in The New York Times, and why they struggle vainly to compare him to Gore and Kerry. “Despite our repeated attempts to see this election through the prism of memory,” this is not 2000 or 2004 or, for that matter, any previous election in American history. Barack Obama has created a whole new narrative, and the past can’t tell us how it ends.