Obama Winning Support Among Those Who Haven't Been Paying Attention

For those of us who have been immersed in the political campaign for nearly 2 years it's hard to imagine that there are millions of Americans who are just now starting to pay attention. Those people missed the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the connections to unrepentant domestic terrorist William Ayres and con man Tony Rezko, the "bitter clingers" comments and many other things that make Obama so unpalatable as our next president. The Obama those people saw during the debate on Friday night is not the Obama the rest of us know. Mark Ambinder has more:

The first presidential debate was watched by tens of millions of people who were seeing the candidates discuss their views for the first time.

Both campaigns know that the most get-able voters at this point are the ones who are highly engaged with the race but tend to base their views on the highest, loudest levels of information.

The people most likely to move the poll numbers one way or another haven't been tuning into the 30 or so primary debates we've had; low information voters were the most relevant audience Friday night.

There was something Pat Buchanan said that night that is at once blindingly obvious and yet very important; Obama's debate performance placed him solidly in the American political mainstream.

Think of the "bitter" comment, his middle name, the flag pin, the Chicago connections. Low information voters wouldn't be out of line if they had a pretty strong impression of Obama formed by these attributes.

The sober performance and the congeniality towards McCain worked so well because so many people expected to see someone dangerous. Obama, in the debate, just did not read as an Ayres-Wright Chicago Elite Radical. Even the throwaway line: "we'd lower everybody's taxes if we could" quietly undercuts the notion of old-school liberalism.

It's possible that this weird racial/ideological caricature was priced into our (campaigns, media) debate expectations, and with Obama coming off as a sensible, middle of the road senator actually did him a world of good as far as the reassurance of sensibility.

The shame of all of this is that the election could end up being decided by people who were either too disinterested or too stupid to pay attention to the election and the candidates up until now.