Why, you ask, is Obama wasting his time on such a small-scale event–a “Discussion with Working Families,” according to the campaign–with only a few precious hours remaining before the potentially decisive Pennsylvania primary? Easy–he’s covering his bases. If there’s anything keeping Obama’s campaign from breaking through in the Keystone State, it’s the impression, prevalent among blue-collar types I meet on the road, that he’s all hot air–a notion, incidentally, that Hillary Clinton is doing nothing to discourage. “I’m offering real solutions, not just speeches, for the problems we face,” she wrote in this morning’s Philadelphia Daily News. “Because it’s not enough to just say you’re going to solve our problems; you need to know how you’re going to do it.”
For Obama, today’s MCCC event was meant to serve as a kind of corrective. Look, he said, as he answered questions from unemployed computer technicians and folks with four children in college (all of them selected by the campaign) about gas prices, education reform, the economy and the nurse shortage. Just because I can speak to crowds of 35,000 about airy concepts like hope and change doesn’t mean I can’t also speak to crowds of 25 about kitchen-table concerns. And if you doubt Team Obama’s desire to emphasize that message on D-Day, just compare his schedule to Clinton’s. She’s holding quickfire rallies in three of Pennsylvania’s smaller media markets–Scranton, Pittsburgh and Harrisburg–before the evening news begins; he only has one event scheduled before 6:00–this one–and it’s in the make-or-break suburbs of the state’s largest city (Philadelphia). If local producers want to cover Obama tonight, they’ll be forced to show him perched on a park bench talking about about No Child Left Behind–slowly, seriously and without a soundbite to cling to. And that’s exactly what his campaign wants.
For me, the best part of today’s event was watching the national press corps squirm. While Obama chatted about things that, you know, actually matter to people–like how to solve the nurse shortage crisis with a woman recently paralyzed from the waist down–the media types in attendance did everything and anything but listen. A cable-news embed yawned. Two reporters discussed their injured dogs. Several well-known newsniks barked into their cell phones, while others chewed the cud with David Axelrod. No one took notes. In fact, the only time the press poo-bahs perked up was when Obama detoured to say hello to a gaggle of fans who were barred from participating; hoping to catch an unscripted slip, photographers and reporters ran across the courtyard and closed in on the candidate like a pack of wolves. Sadly, nothing happened, and by the end of the event, the decision was unanimous. “What are you writing?” one embed asked another. “‘Cause I don’t know what to say.” “Today’s so lame, there’s just nothing,” a network correspondent told his producer back in New York. Which is understandable enough; having heard Obama discuss his health care plan hundreds of times, the national press corps gravitates toward the trivial tit-for-tat rather than the same old specifics. After all, you can’t spell the word “news” without “new.”
That said, for the local media–KYW News Radio, Channel 6 Action News, the Inquirer, et cetera–everything campaign-related is bright, shiny and novel. Hence Obama’s strategy. On my way out, for example, I ran into a schlumpy, middle-aged guy I recognized from the event. Wearing a tweed blazer and toting a notepad, he had stood atop a wall directly in front of the only speaker, ceaselessly scribbling, his tape recorder pressed to the black box in front of him. I asked which outlet he was with. “The Morning Call,” he said. “It’s an Allentown paper.”
In other words, don’t expect to hear a lot more about Obama’s “Discussion with Working Families.” Unless, of course, you live in Pennsylvania–and can actually vote.
