Does Cali really think the Wright thing isn't an issue for voters?

[Oxcoug]

If so, just give me one second to be amused................ OK.

Three recent and very telling anecdotes:

Yesterday I was in a meeting with with the editor and publisher of a major left center publication (i.e. household name). The banter strayed, as it will to election talk. The Publisher (who has facilitated some of the most damaging critiques of the Bush admin) described her faith in Obama as "shaken." I asked "what made that happen?" She said "two degrees is not enough distance from Louis Farrakhan, and twenty years in a hothouse for religious and racial bigotry shows some incredibly poor judgment" and "he's lost his glow - he's been unmasked as another cynical politician."

Second - I have recently dated a girl who's father is an agnostic New York Jew who has voted Democratic since he cast his first vote for McGovern. He took me out to dinner a month ago and confided that he might be voting for a Republican for the first time in his life specifically because of the Wright episode.

Third - one of my colleagues in Berkeley who had been a diehard for Obama recently jumped ship and signed up as a Clinton volunteer.

Here's the hint - some of the problems stemming from Wright might not show up in the polls you're looking at right now. But the number of retired Jewish voters lost through a second degree association with Farrakhan will almost certainly cost Obama a shot at Florida. And that's not even getting to his resulting problems with working class white guys in Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

It may not lose him the election - but it will help make it far closer than it ought to be this year.