Anyone watching? Here's the Wallace (Fox) take:
Wallace said that if Obama had won Pennsylvania he may not have accepted the FOX News Sunday invitation. But he said that once Obama met him for the interview, the Illinois senator was "friendly" and discussed several moderate-to-Republican viewpoints, making an apparent effort to broaden his appeal.
"He made it very clear he was not some left ... liberal and he had been mischaracterized as such," Wallace said. "I think this was an effort to sort of restore or regain the brand that he had some months ago, when he was saying there wasn't a Republican solution, or a Democratic solution. It was a new politics and it needed to be a coalition."
Now, I don't know whether Wallace is accurate in what he's saying of the interview. If its correct, this is Obama combating what I noted in
an entry yesterday on how Obama's movement/message has been somewhat hijacked:
There does seem to have been a shift of a part of Obama's base, from Church-attending voters, toward secular warrior voters. When Edwards was in the race, many of them backed him instead of Obama, and it allowed a much fresher and younger voice of the Obama supporter to emerge. Now, the 'pissed off and not gonna hide it' Democrats have become a vocal part of Obama's base, beyond the youth and African-American supporters. This bitterness, amplified on the internet by some of his supporters, especially in their obsessive hatred tone toward anything Clinton, has replaced the hopefulness that pervaded his earlier supporter message. I'm not saying that Obama has changed his message, or suggesting this is a portrayal of all Obama supporters, but pointing toward a vocal part of what has become his part of his most strident base (on this note Keith Olbermann might reflect on his responsibility in having fostered a part of this attitude). I'm also not saying that there is nothing in the country that needs changing, there is, but Presidential elections are won by the candidate and movement message which is the most hopeful about the country.
This is basically Obama kicking the 'dailykos-americablog-moveon-thenation' secular warrior partisans out of the way to make room for the pivot to 'the center' (and recapture the image of a part of his base he previously held). Its the anti-thesis of the belief that we are in such a partisan-age that base politics is what wins a GE, not Obama (nor McCain, for that matter) believe it.
The 'center' strategy reflects a deep-seated belief by Obama and his strategists that the way to win the GE will be to move toward the middle voters. Obama's went a round-about way of securing the hardcore partisan base that he would need to win the secure the nomination. His post-PA strategy assumes he's got it in the bag, and its time to make the move to the general. The intention is partly overt, in reaching out to the right (and appeasing the media that he knows where he went wrong), but the overt action is to distance from (maybe even piss off) the hardcores from the left enough that they stop co-opting the Obama brand.
Now, maybe all the above is just utter bullshit, and Wallace made a complete distortion of what happened, or maybe the headfake was the Obama campaign telling TPM that Obama was going there "to take Fox on". Not having drunken a silo of Obama koolaid, I'm pretty confident that it's an accurate take by Wallace. And besides, I doubt there are that many hardcore partisans, the ones that keep dreaming Obama's movement has anything to do with a fighting partisan position, will abandon him over this anytime soon, they've still got Clinton around to hate on.
