Obama Media

Obama, Rookie Mistakes and Fictional Non-fiction

March 27, 2007 on 12:44 pm | In obama, Dreams of My Father | No Comments

Oliver Waters, whose day job is at Media Matters, skewers Politico’s Mike Allen for today’s Rookie Mistake Plague Obama piece:

The piece is supposedly about “rookie mistakes” plaguing the Obama campaign but the best Mike Allen could dredge up from the political sewer is a verbal miscue or two from the senator … A few weeks ago John McCain couldn’t remember his position on AIDs, but for the sort of hackery Allen seems dead set on writing in the 2008 campaign it was more important to note that Sen. Obama and Sen. Edwards have both used the phrase “a new kind of politics”….This is not journalism. It isn’t objective reporting of the facts. It’s dishing nonsense in order to placate a political party and movement, and the Politico and Mike Allen are serving them up fat, slow, and over the plate.

I think Waters protests too much. Allen might be onto something here:

Obama’s gift with language — his powerful speaking style and the graceful prose and compelling story of his best-selling memoir — has been an engine of his dramatic, high-velocity rise in presidential politics. But he has also shown a tendency toward seemingly minor contradictions and rhetorical slips that serve as reminders that he is still a newcomer to national politics.

Allen also sites (but doesn’t link– what kind of new internet journalism is that?) to Sunday’s big Tribune fact check of Obama’s 1995 book “Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritanc.e”

The article, based on 40 interviews and travel to Hawaii and Indonesia, asserts: “Several of his oft-recited stories may not have happened in the way he has recounted them. Some seem to make Obama look better in the retelling, others appear to exaggerate his outward struggles over issues of race, or simply skim over some of the most painful, private moments of his life.”