Tag: white

#rsrh Barack Obama’s white-bread campaign HQ. *Very* white-bread.

I decided not to be cute about this: after all, rampant hypocrisy typically isn’t.

President Barack Obama’s team is looking to hire more African-Americans, a search that has stirred a debate among black Democrats about Obama’s record on diversity and its implications for his reelection.

“Looking to hire.” Good God. Just hire them, OK?  …And I love how the Politico article tries to make this sort of thing sound hard.  You see, it’s not actually hard to hire a competent staff that fits whatever reasonable criteria you’ve set up, even at very short notice (which this kind of is).  It will simply not be cheap.  But, hey!  The campaign’s rolling in money, right?

Right?

Gallup: Obama slips with African-Americans, Hispanics…

…unexpectedly.

Gallup mentions the most obvious point – the President has slipped from his historical approval rating among African-Americans (usually around 92%) all the way down to 85%* – but it kind of obscures a detail on the graph with regard to Hispanic voters. They acknowledge that the President is currently at a low with 54% of those voters, but Gallup does not point out that Obama’s approval rating dropped by double digits with those voters over a year ago and hasn’t really come back since. For that matter, the real story from that graph is that the President has a 39% approval rating among whites; his approval rating among those voters at the beginning of his term was somewhere just above 60%.

Andrew Malcolm is right to couch all of this in terms of it merely being worrisome for the President; after all, it’s early days yet. But he’s also right that Obama should be worrying about this, given that hyper-enthusiasm is precisely what his campaign needs if they seriously plan to raise a billion dollars for the 2012 campaign. In fact, i think that the billion-dollar number is going to end up being a bit of an albatross for the President: it will require a constant, probably grueling, emphasis on fundraising in order to work, and it has already forced the President to formally re-enter the electoral arena months early. In other words, the President may have been better off if he had decided not to try to beat his high score. Continue reading Gallup: Obama slips with African-Americans, Hispanics…