While I've been a DailyKos member since the 2004 elections, I've rarely posted diaries. But today I'm posting the following, which has also been crossposted to my Open Diary blog.
I always thought it was a good that the whole preacher controversy came out now, instead of closer to the general election. Basically, the vast majority of Americans will be utterly bored by the topic come November, while if the controversy erupted in October there would be a good chance that it could swing the election the other way. Never underestimate the power of today's Americans' short-attention span!
But for several months now, I had wondered how to get Obama seen by more Americans. For many people, once you hear Obama give a speech, you instantly like him. Not only is he remarkably intelligent, but he is amazingly charismatic, rivaling even Bill Clinton in the political realm. It was while watching the 2004 Democratic convention that I first realized how powerful a speaker Obama could be. But even in the midst of an election year, the mainstream news media is only going to give us sound bites, or increasingly inane debates.
Now I'm not going to say that the whole preacher controversy hasn't hurt Obama somewhat in the polls, but talk about turning lemons into lemonade! Yesterday, Obama delivered a remarkable, historic speech that is getting full coverage due to the controversy. This puts him out there where more people can see him, and he delivers thoroughly with a speech he wrote himself. If Bush tried to write a speech himself, I shudder to think what that would be like ("uh, uh, uh, ...", Oh wait, that's what his normal, staff-written speeches sound like--a human dial-tone, as Stephanie Miller puts it).
And he follows that up with two more speeches on the following days, one about Iraq today, and another on the economy (I think) tomorrow. Any other time, the speeches would at best have been barely covered by the media, but given what came yesterday, we'll see much more extensive coverage of them this week. And again I posit, the more people see Obama, unfiltered by the media, the more they will like him. And by "people", of course, I am not including the 20%ers, those who would still like Bush even if he did actually, as they say, have sex with a goat on the White House lawn. Those "people" are beyond hope.
With a brand new, shiny mortgage, I can't afford to contribute to Obama nearly as much as I did to Kerry in 2004, and my job prohibits me from volunteering for partisan candidates. But I am squeezing out $25 each month from my budget, painful though it is, to contribute to his candidacy. I have been doing so for several months now, and plan on doing so until November, when I predict Obama will win the presidency in a landslide. Not only that, but I'm giving 50/50 odds at the moment that the Dems will pick up enough Senate seats to have a filibuster-proof majority of 60, something that is unlikely to happen if Clinton becomes the Democratic candidate.