Rav Casley Gera

Pundits are calling it for Obama, and in response, McCain has gone on the attack. The next four weeks are likely to get heated and nasty as the candidates sling all the mud they’ve been hoarding while talking about upending politics as usual (Obama’s sudden willingness to dredge up the 20-year old Keating Five scandal suggests he’s going to go on the offensive himself).

It’s a natural instinct for Obama supporters to leap to his defence in the face of every attack by conservatives. And there is a lot of crap being thrown around. But as polling day looms, it’s worth remembering that there are some real problems with Obama and his candidacy. Whether any of them is a dealbreaker, I’ll leave up to you.

Three attacks on Obama that shouldn’t worry you…

1. He’s friends with some shady types. 

You already know about Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The McCain campaign is now focusing on William Ayers, the former violent 1960’s radical who has served on a charity board with Obama; there’s also been controversy over Obama’s links to Tony Rezko, the property dealer currently charged with corruption, and ACORN, a voter registration group that supported his early campaigns and has been accused of voter fraud. The four cases are very different: Ayers’ sins are most serious, but were longest ago, and there’s no real evidence the two were friends.h They do appear to have retained some charity connections after Obama found out about his past _ I’ll leave it up to you whether it would be more honourable to drop a charitable project because of its founder’s childhood crimes, or to condemn those crimes and persevere. Rev. Wright’s relationship with Obama was the longest, but his crimes were minor - if you consider a little light demagoguery a crime at all - and Obama has denounced them thoroughly and publicly (indeed, Sarah Palin seems to be about the only person left in the McCain campaign who doesn’t understand why he’s no longer an issue). ACORN supported Obama’s early campaigns, but Obama hasn’t been otherwise involved with them since the early 1990s, back in his community-organising days. 

Rezko is probably the most worrisome connection, as the crimes are recent and the two were genuinely close. But Obama is accused of no wrongdoing. In the end, these issues aren’t resonating with voters because there’s no evidence that Obama ever sympathised with or collaborated in any of their wrongdoings (with the possible exception of Wright). Supposed “revelations” by conservatives, usually providing evidence of slightly closer ties than previously thought, have failed to suggest Obama was complicit in anything illegal or reprehensible. Obama’s initial riposte - that he should be judged by his own past, not that of his friends - seems to satisfy most voters. After all, realistically, it seems unlikely anyone can rise in Chicago’s notorious political scene without picking up some questionable associations.

2. He voted “present” 130 times in the Illinois senate. 

File this one under “true but misleading”. In fact, he voted “present” 129 times, but this accounts for only 3% of the over 4,000 votes he participated in. Nor are these the fence-sitting abstentions they seem. Illinois allows senators to vote “present”, and it’s traditionally used as a way of opposing measures with a little less risk than voting “no”. You might think that a little cowardly, but Obama’s use of it is nothing special by Illinois standards.

3. He’s been a do-nothing in the U.S. Senate.

Obama has been accused of missing most Senate votes to focus on his campaigning. As one snarky article put it, “For twenty years, Obama has walked the floors of the most prestigious institutions in the nation, but has left no footprints other than those from his runs for whatever office came next.” And it’s true that, in the last year, Obama’s Senate record has been decimated by his campaigning. He’s missed 47% of votes this year, placing him third in Washington Post’s ranking of vote-missers. But who’s at number one, missing a whopping 64.1% of this years votes? You guessed it: one Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

And one that should

1. Accessibility. The press is right to be angry at its lack of any opportunity to question Sarah Palin, barring one, heavily stage-managed press conference a few weeks ago. But Obama has not gone out of his way to make himself accessible. His early press conferences were marked by his tendency not to directly address difficult questions. His campaign stops have generally eschewed the traditional Q&A with audiences. And his campaign has come down hard on reporters they feel have misrepresented it or the polls. Even his much-vaunted web presence, while utilising thousands of volunteers around America, has been highly centralised when it comes to the media message. None of this is a problem, per se. But it suggests a man who isn’t really comfortable with criticism. And we’ve had someone like that for the last eight years. If Obama wins, his supporters should join in the outrage if he doesn’t improve on  Bush’s terrible record of inaccessibility to the press.