In 2004, right after becomming the senator of Illinois when asked if he would run for President, Barack Obama ruled it out saying he hadn’t the experience,
Now, for an analysis from Newsbusters,
While liberal media members try to make the case that six years as mayor and less than two years as governor isn’t enough experience to be vice president, shouldn’t they be just as concerned about whether less than two years as senator qualifies one to be president?
After all, just days after winning his U.S. Senate seat in 2004, Barack Obama said he didn’t have enough experience to sit in the White House.
As he basically threw his hat in the presidential ring during an October 22, 2006, appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” it means that less than 22 months in the Senate is all he needed to be more qualified than he felt he was roughly two years prior. . . . .
So, what experience did Obama get between January 2005 when he was sworn into the Senate and October 2006 that suddenly made him qualified to be president?
Maybe more important, given what he said on November 8, 2004, shouldn’t this be a question media are regularly asking of the man that is one election away from the White House?
Or are such questions only saved for Republican vice presidential candidates?
As an aside, when ABC’s Charles Gibson interviewed Obama on November 1, 2007, there was absolutely no mention of what the junior senator from Illinois said of his lack of experience in 2004.
I wonder why.
For the entire article from Newsbusters, click on this text link.
From Newsmax,
Mark Penn, a top strategist to both Clintons, told CBSNews.com in answer to whether he thinks the media is being uniquely tough on Gov. Sarah Palin: “I think that the media is doing the kinds of stories on Palin that they’re not doing on the other candidates.”
Penn added, “And that’s going to subject them to people concluding that they’re giving her a tougher time. Now, the media defense would be, ‘Yeah, we looked at these other candidates who have been in public life at an earlier time.’
”What happened here very clearly is that the controversy over Palin led to 37 million Americans tuning into a vice-presidential speech, something that is unprecedented, because they wanted to see for themselves. This is an election in which the voters are going to decide for themselves. The media has lost credibility with them.”
As to what the strategist thinks about the extent of Palin’s appeal to a lot of swing voters, Penn noted: “I think, at the end of the day, people do vote for the top of the ticket. The question is whether or not Palin has given people a better view of the top of the ticket and more and more confidence in terms of what he would fight for.
”I think she clearly has energized the Republican Party in a way that they were not energized and that party members were very worried that McCain was going to choose somebody who wouldn’t have the more conservative values that the mainstream of the Republican Party has. Whether or not she’s really going to play or is playing a big role with swing voters, that remains to be seen. I think that’s a lot less clear.”
