This winter, article after article talked about the huge audiences Barack Obama was drawing. Experienced pundits like Fred Barnes were saying that Barack OBama was likely to be the 44th President of the United States. What nobody was paying attention to, though, was Sean Hannity talking about Jeremiah Wright or William Ayers.

Three months after Super Tuesday, and two months after the YouTube videos showed up of Jeremiah Wright screaming about the USKKK of A and talking about the United States government creating the AIDS virus just to commit genocide against the black population, Barack Obama isn’t seen as the candidate of inevitability anymore. This article essentially says that Barack Obama has ‘come back to the pack’. ALOT.

Sen. Barack Obama’s aura of inevitability in the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination has diminished in the wake of his loss in the Pennsylvania primary and the furor over his former pastor, said the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll.

The poll was conducted largely before Obama’s news conference Tuesday denouncing his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and may not fully capture the impact of the controversy or the response. But it found that Obama, whose delegate lead has given him a commanding position over Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton since February, is now perceived to be in a much tighter fight.

Upheaval has taken a toll

Fifty-one percent of Democratic primary voters say they expect Obama to win the nomination; 69 percent said so a month ago. Forty-eight percent of Democrats say Obama has with the best chance of beating Sen. John McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee, down from 56 percent a month ago.

Obama still holds an edge on several key measures: 46 percent say he remains their choice for the nomination, while 38 percent preferred Clinton, who has lost support among men. On that question, his margin grew, to 8 from 3 points, in the past month.

Obama also has an advantage over Clinton in ratings on honesty and integrity and in being less beholden to special interest groups.

A multitiude of pundits think that Obama’s delegate lead makes him untouchable. Other pundits think that he doesn’t share Jeremiah Wright’s worldview. I’m not certain that he doesn’t share Jeremiah Wright’s worldview.

The fact that more than 2 out of 3 people used to think that he was the nominee and that barely 1 out of 2 now think that he’ll be the nominee is a pretty sharp plunge.

Earlier today, I saw a poll on TV (I don’t know which network) that showed Sen. Obama’s favorability/unfavorability rating had gone from a +21 points to a +5. To be specific, Sen. Obama’s ratings had gone from 54-33 to 47-42.

Don’t interpret this as meaning that Hillary will get the nomination. I don’t believe that. Her negatives are higher than Sen. Obama’s. Here’s another reason why I don’t think she’ll get the nomination:

Obama still holds an edge on several key measures: 46 percent say he remains their choice for the nomination, while 38 percent preferred Clinton, who has lost support among men. On that question, his margin grew, to 8 from 3 points, in the past month.
Obama also has an advantage over Clinton in ratings on honesty and integrity and in being less beholden to special interest groups.

Being perceived as more honest and “less beholden to special interest groups” is an undeniable plus. That said, more performances by him where he pretends to not have known Wright’s incendiary views will drop his honesty ratings in a heartbeat.

The bloom is off Obama’s rose. Now that the new media has forced the Agenda Media to deal with the skeletons in Sen. Obama’s closets, his St. Barry image is getting tarnished. That was the sole basis of his appeal. People voted for him because they thought he’d be a post-partisan, post-racial candidate who would unite people. Now they see that he’s just a politician who’ll say whatever he needs to get elected.

Technorati Tags: Obama, Hillary, Polling, Election 2008

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog

1. Maybe your professionism prevents you, as I sure it does Hillary, from being blunt, Gary.

   Im retired, dont give a crap about political correctness, and dont have to answer the bloviating academics, and Chomsky-ites. So allow me to be blunt.

   Obama is a commnunist.

   Those who know what Marxism is, or lived through the Cold War probably sense it already, but are being polite, those who can not see it by now never will, either because they are too stupid or dont want to see it.

   Comment by T.A. Gray — May 2, 2008 @ 5:32 pm

2. But then, so is HillBill, and John-boy is a socialist who happens to believe in military power against foreign threats instead of using it domestically to control locals.

   That’s the biggest difference between Hussein, HillBill and Mexicain: their willingness to use military power against domestic threats to their own power.

   Comment by Carlos — May 3, 2008 @ 8:41 am