Becoming a One Person Obama Street Poll

Jack Kemp

Late Wednesday afternoon I was in midtown Manhattan, getting ready to cross Fifth Avenue. There was a road block north of me on 57th Street, the type one sees in a parade or an emergency of some kind which gave me pause to stop and study it. While crossing the Avenue, another person near me was talking about “our illustrious President” and I assumed he was on a cell phone and being sarcastic. But upon walking further, I turned to find a well dressed black man talking to me and saying that the commotion up the street was “our illustrious President.” Taken back by the phrase, something one typically hears in a comedy about South American dictators or a 1930s road movie starring Hope and Crosby or the Three Stooges, the best noncommittal reply I could up with at that moment was, “Oh, that’s what it is.” I didn’t even give “our illustrious President” the dignity of addressing him as a person - but rather as a traffic jam concept.


Apparently this would be pollster was testing the waters for Obama’s newly announced reelection campaign, and making me a one person focus group whose reaction he was accessing. Having rushed out of my house without my black American Thinker baseball cap (I wore it in the morning) and not wearing a suit, I looked like a typical citizen of a city that votes 80 percent for Democrats. I believe he wanted to learn my reaction to his phrase “Our Illustrious President” and gauge Obama’s reelection chances. One wonders how well this spontaneous poll taker (he may have well been a professional) does in his other attempts to drum up support for his (perpetual) candidate who was leisurely riding through Manhattan as a national budget crisis loomed in Washington.

I use the term "pollster" with a certain literary license to describe his general intent and mindset. A professional pollster would gather a group of people together, but here he was gauging the Man in the Street - literally. Secondly, he used the over the top phrase "our illustrious president." Who talks like that? No normal civilians of any ethnic group. This is specialized dialogue of people with a professional mindset and vocabulary.

I've lived in New York for most of sixty years and never heard any Democrat refer to their favorite President or presidential candidate with such a flourish of flowery speech. They generally say the name with a loving and respectful tone of voice but with no embellishments of language. And New Yorkers are also hard edged (like this writer) who would be embarrassed to sound too gushy with emotion, particularly in the case of one male speaking to another. He approached me from the side and didn’t see, at first, my American flag lapel pin on a heavy spring coat. I didn't - and still don't – on a typical day look like an English professor or corporate employing going about his day.

If the crosstown traffic delay weren’t enough, when I reached the Sixth Avenue subway line, a man was complaining about train delays he was experiencing. The token clerk said it caused by the president’s visit and he asked why that would be cause for underground subway stoppage. There were also crowds typical of stopped service when I reached the train platform. When Gorbachev visited Manhattan around 1990, there was no subway delays, but in those days there was no cell phone service in the tunnels and perhaps there was concern about a signal for a coordinated attack on Obama as he passed over a subway station.
In 1980, Jimmy Carter lost New York State in his reelection bid along with 44 other states. After four years of hyperinflation and a humiliating hostage situation in Iran, Carter’s percentage of the Jewish vote fell to about 45 percent. In fact, New York State voted for Ronald Reagan again in 1984 over liberal Walter Mondale, Carter’s Vice President who had promised to raise taxes at that summer’s National Convention. To paraphrase Hugo Chavez, one can smell the aroma of roasted peanuts in the air.