So what happened?

In the last few days before the Tuesday primaries I spent inordinate amounts of time watching television. Roger doesn't like it much; I tend to turn it on when he's away and keep it on when there are interesting things happening. And in Dallas we watched non stop. So I think I have a very clear sense of how the news cycle swung in the last few days before the vote.

Four things happened to create a perfect storm for Obama. First, Hillary came out with her famous "3 AM in the White House" ad, questioning Obama's ability to respond to a crisis. His campaign counterattacked with a good clean response (note that I am consciously sparing you more embedded videos). I don't think it would have harmed him much--except for the fact that two events hit the news that could make you wonder about his judgment: a crooked Chicago developer who had supported Obama named Tony Rezko went on trial for fraud and the Canadians leaked a memo purporting to show that a senior economic advisor to Obama, Austan Goolsbee, had privately refuted Obama's position on NAFTA. Just to make things lively, the press was pilloried on Saturday Night Live as fawning over Obama so they were on their mettle to be aggressive in questioning him.

The Rezko story isn't new, the level of Obama-Rezko interaction isn't enormous, and so far there has been no new news that I can see. Obama has given away any money raised for him by Rezko and apologized for the one apparent favor he took personally from the man--the simultaneous purchase by Obama and Rezko's wife of a house and an adjacent vacant lot in Chicago with the eventual sale of a small bit of land to the Obamas. There is no indication that Obama's name will even come up in the trial. But the press began asking the same old questions about the relationship, very aggressively, and in the news clips I saw Obama wasn't entirely smooth in responding. He's clearly sick of the whole thing and doesn't like going through it again.

And then there's Goolsbee. This one is a bit more complex--when the story first broke the Obama campaign and the Canadians denied that there had been a meeting which made the memo leak particularly devastating. Goolsbee was clearly naive; he shouldn't have gone alone, he should have asked that he review any written record before distribution and he should have written his own follow up note that was worded in the way the Obama folks wanted. And of course he should have notified the campaign immediately about the meeting. Once the story was clear Obama said, consistently, that Goolsbee had only said what the campaign is saying: that NAFTA needs some re-examination.

Taken individually, neither story sounds like too much harm done. But coming both at the same time during the final week with little changes every few hours in the Goolsbee story the effect was brutal. And then, of course, SNL mocked the debates a second time with a closing "commentary" by Hillary herself:

This one is both short and funny which is why I embed it. So in the last 48 hours before voting started we had clips of Obama getting testy with the press contrasted with endless repeats of the video of Hillary making lively fun of herself.

So is this a disaster?

No. It's not fun and I don't sleep as well as I did before last Tuesday but it may well be a blessing in disguise. The most terrible thing that could happen to Senator Obama would be to be nominated in a wave of Democratic good feeling and then loose to McCain. This will be a vicious campaign before it's over and Obama needs all the training he can get before the big guns start swift boating him. I subscribe to the view put forward in this very interesting "History Lesson" in Slate by a man named David Greenberg that continued testing in the primaries isn't a bad thing at all for either candidate. And Obama, in my estimation learns very fast; his performance in the last debate was stunningly better than that in earlier ones and I'm willing to bet that, with a little rest, he will easily answer the Rezko questions and keep his Goolsbees under control. Of course we've had yet another flap about an adviser in the more recent outing of Samantha Power but that's less harmful without all the pressure and she resigned very quickly. It's a shame; I hadn't heard of her before but she sounds like a good guy.

OK, that's all the normal and reasonable analysis. I have one more thing to say which is my paranoid interpretation of the Goolsbee leak but I'll save that for yet another post. Watch this space!