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Getbig Main Boards => Politics and Political Issues Board => Topic started by: Dos Equis on October 20, 2007, 11:59:00 AM
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Star is fading.
Jittery donors want Obama to step it up
By: Ben Smith
Oct 19, 2007 06:51 PM EST
Updated: October 20, 2007 12:16 PM EST
They might have a war chest in the bank and a candidate who draws rock star crowds, but that doesn’t mean Barack Obama supporters aren’t getting the jitters as primary season rapidly approaches.
After all, despite the good press and enthusiasm surrounding Obama, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has stayed solidly ahead in polls and conventional wisdom.
"There's a lot of amateurish thought that he should be in a much stronger position at this point than they think he is," said William Daley, brother of the Chicago mayor and a prominent Obama supporter, of the chatter among Chicago donors to the Illinois senator’s campaign. "That's creating a little bit of backbiting beyond the normal stuff that happens around this time of the cycle."
Daley, who was Commerce secretary under Bill Clinton, said he waves off the concerns. "I say, 'Let’s get real, folks. Nine months ago, this guy was nowhere.'"
The jitters are born of high expectations in the spring that Obama might give Clinton an immediate run for the front-runner's slot. Instead, while Obama has continued to raise money and generate excitement, he has plateaued in national polls.
When Obama's top fundraisers gathered for a national finance committee meeting in Iowa at the beginning of October, “The elephant in the room was, ‘What are we going to do, the polls, the polls, the polls,’” said one donor who was there, adding that Obama and his aides soothed the crowd with a focus on Iowa.
Bundlers complain that they “didn't raise all this money to run a one-state campaign,” said a Chicago Democrat close to the tight circle of Obama's top Chicago donors, who, like others who spoke to Politico, asked to speak on the condition of anonymity. “The frustration has been that they have not been able to move off the personal story and move off this groundswell of enthusiasm and the money to build a campaign in all the key states.”
Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, said he'd heard the complaints.
“I don't begrudge them their anxieties — they’re understandable,” he said. “It’s just important for the campaign to stay focused on what’s real.”
As for Obama himself, Axelrod said, “He's out campaigning. He knows what’s going on in Iowa in a way that a donor sitting somewhere can’t.”
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1007/6457.html