MORE ON JOE KLEIN'S REMARK ABOUT OBAMA

I can't recall exactly where but over the past few weeks I've come across the idea that Obama can't be elected because his base is to narrow, just like Adlai Stevenson. This was brought home to me by Paul Begala's snotty remark about Obama's base (via HuffPo):

"We can't win with eggheads and African-Americans."

If I remember correctly, it was the "eggheads" who really liked Stevenson and this plays into the "elitist" meme that the wingnuts love to push about any Democratic presidential candidates, Gore and Kerry being the most recent examples.

Klein's comment was preceded by Adam Nagourney's remark from April 8, 2007 in the New York Times:

But there is also, in a historical comparison that his supporters have tended to resist, the cool intellectualism of Adlai Stevenson who, for all the loyalty he inspired among many Democrats in the 1950s — some of whom still remember him fondly — lost two presidential elections. If Mr. Obama enters the room to the sounds of “Think” by Aretha Franklin and the roar of people coming to their feet, clapping and jostling for photographs, it is only moments before the atmosphere turns from campaign rally to college seminar, when he talks, for example, about the need for a “common sense, nonideological, practical-minded, generous agenda for change in this country.”

I hope the MSM doesn't adopt this as one of its favorite narratives but it may be too late:

Democrats in Conflict, the GOP in Space

By Harold Meyerson
Thursday, April 19, 2007; Page A27
Washington Post
(excerpt)

Declaring his candidacy in Springfield, Ill., Obama summoned memories of Lincoln as well as of the last Illinois governor to run for president, Adlai Stevenson, the first modern, upscale Democratic reformer, who lost twice to Dwight Eisenhower. In what I believe to be the first article to discuss the coming class typologies of Democratic candidates -- "Stevenson and the Intellectuals," a prophetic 1954 essay -- literary and political critic Irving Howe noted that Stevenson wasn't really as liberal as Harry Truman had been on economic questions but that he was "admired and identified with" by the new middle-class Democratic reformers "because he didn't really seem to like politics." He was the candidate, wrote Howe, "who would rise above mere group interests."

Sounds a lot like Obama to me.