According to Dick Polman, looks like it was Obama:
Fairly or not, there are millions of white voters who need to feel more comfortable with Obama before they can commit to supporting him. If they somehow perceive that Obama is in thrall to Jesse and the old-guard civil rights leaders, they will not support him. They have never been comfortable with Jesse’s style, or his victimhood ethos. And they weren’t fans of Jesse when he ran for president; back in the 1988 primaries, Jesse drew only 12 percent of all the white voters.
This is why Jesse’s off-camera outburst (“See, Barack’s been talking down to black people…I wanna cut his nuts off”) is such a gift to Obama. It’s vivid evidence that Jesse has been politically marginalized, that time has passed him by, that his large and tender ego has been bruised, and that all he can do is lash out from the sidelines. Heck, even his own son publicly repudiated him. And wary white voters can now say to themselves, “If Jesse is this ticked off at Obama, that’s a big compliment to Obama.”
That’s just one of the gifts that Obama got this week. We’ll see, as Josh Marshall points out through one of his commenters, whether “whining” will replace “clinging” as the most used verb when describing Joe and Jane Sixpack.
Tags: mccain, obama, talking points memo, josh marshall, dick polman, whining, clinging, phil gramm
