Sep 13, 2008

Sister Souljah Time


Free Advice Of The Day: If Barack Obama wants to win this election, he needs to take a page from the Bill Clinton Playbook and do a “Sister Souljah” on one of the legion of lefty journos who have been eviscerating Sarah Palin.

He needs to find a particularly nasty and unlikable journo, someone whose criticism seems mostly focused on Palin’s hair and accent and kids names and all that, and go to town on them the way Clinton went to town on Ms. Souljah for her comment about the L.A. riots.

And he legitimately can.

His mother was a teenage mother. She was on food stamps. He grew up without a father. He knows what it’s like to live outside the mainstream. To be the outsider looking in on that Starbucks and Whole Food world. And he desperately needs to remind people of that.

He needs to get pissed off, in a big way, that the message that’s clearly coming out from the Huffington Posts and Daily Koses is “How dare this white trash woman think she can run the world?”

Here’s why he needs to do this right now: Not liking Sarah Palin’s politics is one thing. But too many of the attacks seem to focus on her lifestyle. This is not lost on her supporters, the undecideds and everyone else in middle America: the disgust is about who she is, not what she stands for. Which just helps to cement the impression that Obama is one of the “we think we’re better than you” coastal establishment. And every moose joke, every online comment about “how could you elect someone who names her kid Track?” just cements this impression that the election is all about class lines and geographic location.

If Obama Sister Souljahs the leftist journalists, then he distances himself from the class warfare and bring the election back to the issues. There's no downside: it's not like the HuffPosties are going to stop supporting him or stay home from the polls. And if he can convince the undecided voters that he gets where they're coming from, that he doesn't look down on them because he was once one of them, then he has a real shot at convincing them to vote for him.

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