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Tired of Obama

Here, via Frank Rich (who once again deserves praise not only for a good column, but also for putting links in the online versions of his columns so we can look up the data he references) an interesting result from the Pew Center which reveals that people are sick and tired of hearing about Barack Obama. Many fewer people feel that way about John McCain. The sense that Obama is over-covered and McCain under-covered seems to be correlated reasonably strongly with a proclivity to support McCain — Democrats don’t find Obama to be nearly as over-exposed as Republicans do.

This is interesting because it basically runs counter to the campaigns’ strategy. The McCain camp has mostly pushed the idea that the selection should be seen as a referandum on Obama in which the press and the public are supposed to scrutinize Obama intently and just take McCain at face value as an acceptable alternative. Conversely, liberals have been trying to draw attention to McCain’s actual views — his desire to ban abortions, solve all problems by launching wars, raises taxes on middle class health insurance while cutting them for heiresses and wealthy investors, etc.

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