Barack Obama has run a largely gaffe-free campaign. Until he
picked up a bowling ball. While attempting to woo blue collar voters in Pennsylvania, the Democratic frontrunner bowled a 37, while rolling several balls into the gutter.
His disastrous performance has earned him widespread ridicule. As MSNBC's Joe Scarborough put it, "
He bowls like my four-and-a-half-year-old daughter."
The
late-night comedians have been no less forgiving:
"His score was 37. Out of a possible 300, he bowled 37. Of course, being a Democrat, he automatically demanded a recount, so they had to go back." --Jay Leno
"I bowled a 37 when I was a baby. And I was drunk, by the way." --Jimmy Kimmel.
"Afterwards, Obama told reporters, 'That's it, no more white guy sports for me. That's it.' He canceled his weekend at Hockey Camp." --Conan O'Brien
Jon Stewart imagines a scenario in which Barack Obama's poor bowling skills could
endanger national security.
His sleeves rolled up but his tie still firmly knotted, Barack Obama picked up a shiny black bowling ball, strode confidently toward the lane and promptly hurled the ball straight into the right gutter.
His second try missed right, too. It wasn't exactly a promising start to his first bowling trip in 30 years, on a campaign stop Saturday night.
"Let me tell you something," he said, turning to the crowd of patrons -- and, he surely hoped, voters in next month's Democratic primary. "My economic plan is better than my bowling." "It has to be," a man standing nearby shot back.
But by the time Obama and Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey Jr. -- his newest, and most heavily trumpeted, supporter in the Keystone State -- had finished seven frames at Pleasant Valley Bowl, the Illinois Democrat's game had slowly, but steadily, improved.
He kept his shots in the middle of the lane, though he rolled them without quite enough force to knock down all 10 pins at once.
So what if Casey (who also hadn't bowled in years) wound up beating him? When Obama finally cleaned up a spare, he declared victory, changed out of his Velcro bowling shoes and hopped back on the bus that will carry him through Pennsylvania's small cities and towns until Wednesday.
"He has potential," said Roxanne Hart, 43, an Altoona resident who had invited Obama and Casey to join her lane. She was talking about his bowling; she had already decided what she thought of his politics. "I think he'd be a wonderful president."
Trailing Hillary Clinton by double digits in the latest Pennsylvania polls, Obama is just now embarking on a push to close the gap before the April 22 primary.
On Friday, he launched a bus tour in Pittsburgh that will wind up in Philadelphia Wednesday -- with plenty of time in the vast parts of the state that Clinton advisor James Carville once famously declared "Alabama in between."
If he struggles as much dealing with blue-collar voters here as he did with bowling, he could be in some trouble.
Heavy black turnout in the big cities could help Obama, but to pull off a surprise win, he'll need to hold his own in places like Altoona, where many voters are the working-class white Catholics who have remained fiercely loyal to Clinton throughout the primary season.
Not coincidentally, that's also the strategy Obama (or Clinton) would need to beat John McCain in Pennsylvania in November.
Even if he doesn't win the primary, Obama hopes to prove to Democratic superdelegates -- the one audience that's even more powerful than undecided voters in Pennsylvania and the other nine jurisdictions left to hold elections -- that he could keep the Keystone State blue in the fall, which either Democrat will have to do to win the White House.
So Obama is trading the raucous urban and campus rallies that have defined his campaign up to now for Q-and-A sessions in small-town high school gyms, interspersed with visits to steel mills, bowling allies, hot dog shops and dairy farms.
Well, mostly trading them -- a huge gathering at Penn State University Sunday, the only one of its kind planned for the bus trip, drew an estimated 22,000 "screaming liberal sycophants," as one prominent Republican has dubbed Obama crowds.
He's playing up his opposition to Washington lobbyists, saying the game wouldn't be so stacked against the people he's talking to if the rules were different, and painting Clinton as the candidate of the status quo.
A new ad on Pennsylvania TV rails against gas prices, and his speeches call for bringing "more fairness" to the economy.
And he's rolling around the state with ex-Pittsburgh Steelers like Jerome Bettis and Franco Harris, who are far more popular among key constituencies than any politician could dream of being.
Given enough time, his aides think, voters here will warm up to Obama. Look at Iowa, they say, where familiarity (and field organizing) persuaded an all-but-lily-white state to give Obama the campaign's first prize.
Ohio, in the Obama campaign's narrative, doesn't prove much, even with demographics almost identical to those of western Pennsylvania, because he had to split time there with Texas in the two-week run-up to those primaries. "You know, we were having these huge rallies and it's just hard to get questions and have a lot of interaction," Obama said Saturday.
"When we were having [a primary] a week ... you couldn't really take time for the retail politics that I enjoy and think helps people know me better. We can take a little more leisurely pace when we have six weeks to campaign in the state."
But will blue-collar workers really buy it? This is a candidate who went to a ritzy private high school in Hawaii before going on to Columbia University and Harvard Law School. Before he got to the Senate, he taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago.
Meanwhile, he spent Friday night and Saturday morning in Johnstown, Pa., where only 8 percent of adults have a bachelor's degree. Obama carries himself with a hip, ironic kind of coolness, but it's not clear whether that will play as well in steel towns as it does in college towns.
His style isn't quite your father's populism; more to the point, it's not Bob Casey's father's populism, either.
Watching NCAA basketball at a Johnstown sports bar Friday night, Obama was careful to make sure the Yuengling he was drinking wasn't "some designer beer," coining a new phrase in his eagerness to avoid elitism, and betraying his ignorance of cheap, tasty Pennsylvania lagers to boot.
The "short" speeches Obama gives at town halls to leave time for questions still run 35 minutes, and he still only takes questions from five or six voters before he leaves.
By comparison, McCain stays longer, giving shorter answers but more of them.
Even his experience as a community organizer in poor Chicago neighborhoods may not translate to the white working-class Democrats he's trying to sway now -- on the South Side, he had to worry about whether he was black enough.