Larison was pretty confident that the Wright brouhaha meant the end of Obama before any polling had even been done. ~Jim Henley

Of course, Mr. Henley is also free to critique my posts and claim that I don’t know what I’m talking about.  That’s also something that bloggers do.  But I am quite sure that I said nothing of the kind.  If anything, I have consistently underestimated the importance of the Wright controversy, because I didn’t think it was that new or shocking; I freely admitted that I had been following the Obama campaign more closely than a lot of “ordinary people” and so wasn’t gauging reaction to it very well.  When polling started showing that damage had been done, at least temporarily, I took note of that, but prior to that I made no such bold claims about “the end of Obama.”  I have been tracking state polls that show Obama falling behind McCain all over the country, but that may prove to be temporary.  I have assumed that as Obama became better known to the general electorate, his numbers would decline, and I think the last two months have supported that assumption.  I don’t think anyone could claim that my response to his Philadelphia speech belonged to the “Obama is doomed!” genre; it was, at most, a claim that Obama had some serious potential problems on his hands.  The controversy really was damaging to Obama, but I am having difficulty finding the place where I expressed confidence that Obama was finished.  Of course, it could be that I have no idea what “ordinary people” think, but that doesn’t mean that these remarks aren’t going to be politically damaging.  They would be irrelevant if they did not appear to undermine one of the principal claims of the campaign (i.e., Obama’s supposed respect for opposing views) and confirm previous statements by the candidate about these kinds of questions.

Update: Jim Henley has very kindly acknowledged that I did not make the claim mentioned above.  My thanks to Mr. Henley for the new post.  I have made more than a few errors over the last three and a half years of blogging, so I quite understand how these misunderstandings happen.