Obama fatigue--hype without content

Andrew Kohut:

As Democrats gather in Denver, many may be looking at the national polls and wondering how the presidential race has tightened so much given that voters are still concerned about the state of the nation and give low ratings to President Bush and the Republican Party. There are now at least four recent polls showing Barack Obama’s lead narrowing to three percentage points.

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... During the summer, the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism found much more extensive media coverage of Mr. Obama than Mr. McCain. This has proved a problem, not a blessing, for the Democratic candidate.

An early August Pew survey found 48 percent of respondents saying they had heard “too much” about Barack Obama. Just 26 percent in the poll said they had heard too much about John McCain, while 38 percent reported that they had heard too little about the likely Republican nominee.

Mr. Obama’s extensive media exposure did not result in giving voters a fuller or better sense of who he is politically. A mid-July Pew survey found 59 percent of voters saying they knew little or nothing about his foreign policy positions, and 49 percent said the same about his economic positions. Knowledge of the Democratic candidate’s foreign policy positions was unchanged from a March poll.

Voters were expressing Obama fatigue in response to a torrent of media coverage that did not add much to their understanding of the candidate. These frustrations may have been reinforced by the McCain campaign’s advertisement that portrayed Mr. Obama as the celebrity candidate.

Conversely, John McCain has enjoyed relative prosperity with less media attention and fewer people in Pew’s weekly surveys saying that he is the candidate that they have been hearing a lot about. As a result, he avoided voters connecting him to President Bush and wondering whether he is a “different kind” of Republican.

A third factor in the tightening of the race is Barack Obama’s lack of progress on his Achilles heel: concerns about his lack of experience. This month, when asked what troubles them most about the Democratic candidate, voters said his “personal abilities and experience.” As many as 40 percent of people who say they will not vote or may not for Mr. Obama cite his experience as the problem. For comparison, when John Kerry and Al Gore ran for president, only 6 percent cited their experience as a problem. Along these lines, this week’s CBS/New York Times poll found 44 percent thinking that Mr. Obama has prepared himself well enough for the job of president, but 68 percent thought that about Mr. McCain.

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The McCain celebrity ads were a nice bit of political jujitsu. They took advantage of the coverage that Obama was getting and turned it against him. While the media and the politicians were calling the ads silly, the voters thought they were a good point. They were. They showed the lack of substance in the Obama glitz and that is reflected by people still being uncertain about his policies. This too gave McCain an opportunity to frame Obama's terrible policy on Iraq and his general lack of experience. McCain/s campaign thinks that when voters get by the glitz and look at the substance they will reject Obama and that appears to be happening.

In fact most of the Democrat advantage in polls appears to be based on voters lack of knowledge about their actual positions. There has never been a greater disconnect between what voters say they want and what the Democrats are offering. It has become to obvious to ignore on energy, which is the real problem with the economy which Democrats say is the main issue. The disconnect is also there on taxes and national security. Only 30 percent of voters back Obama's policy for rigid timetables in Iraq. The media is still trying to spin the time horizon agreement into a validation of Obama's policy, but that is just dishonest.

When you look at the major issues in this years election, energy, taxes and national security, you have to wonder why Democrats are the favorites. I think the onlky reason is they have done an effective job of going negative on the Republicans and until McCain came along no one was really fighting back on the issues in a meaningful way.