Obama's Audio Book Could Damage Candidacy

The Politico reports that the audio-book version of Barack Obama's, Dreams from My Father, could prove highly damaging to the liberal Illinois Senator's campaign this fall:

Barack Obama has proved to be a difficult target to hit — just ask Hillary Rodham Clinton. Opposition researchers, though, hope that they’ve found a weapon to wound Obama in his own voice as recorded for the Grammy Award-winning audio version of his 1995 memoir, “Dreams from My Father.”

While candidates often have their own words turned against them in attack ads, it’s one thing to see past statements in block text and something else entirely to hear the same words in the office-seeker’s own voice....

”Dreams from My Father” has been widely acclaimed as an introspective and insightful read far from the anodyne campaign-oriented books politicians often produce, traits that Obama’s critics believe make it ideal for use against the candidate.

In a passage describing his high school experience in Hawaii, for example, Obama explains the allure of drugs: “I kept playing basketball, attended classes sparingly, drank beer heavily, and tried drugs enthusiastically. … If the high didn’t solve whatever it was that was getting you down,” Obama intones, “it could at least help you laugh at the world’s ongoing folly.”

While many voters know that Obama used drugs as a young man, they haven’t heard the senator describe his drug use in those terms, or in his own voice. Nor have they heard him extensively quoting from the first sermon he heard from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., his longtime clergyman whom he renounced during the primary, saying, “The person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago."

Read the whole thing.

Apparently, Hugh Hewitt's been using Obama audio replays in his radio broadcasts (see Hewitt's own post, "Senator Obama, Unplugged").

This could be a veritable goldmine for right-wing smearmasters (Obama's audio-book lauds Revererend Jeremiah Wright, including passages trumpeting, "where white folks' greed runs a world in need."

Hewitt sees the potential:

It has to be the most unusual book ever by a presidential aspirant, and much of what he writes cannot be classified as mainstream...

I'll say.