"losing focus"

Obama himself got distracted from his planned focus on education this week by talking about Palin, partly in response to media questions but also in reaction to the lipstick brouhaha.

Thus saith the SF Chronicle yesterday in an article headlined "As battleground shrinks, rivals narrow focus." But there's no attribution to this statement, no supporting quotations -- nothing. Just a bald assertion.

If you google "Obama speech education dayton" you will find a transcript in the Chicago Sun Times, among many others, and a YouTube posting of the 35-minute-long speech, in which Governor Palin is never mentioned. Not once. I wonder what he will say when he's not talking about Governor Palin and focusing on education instead.

It seems to me that the focus on Governor Palin isn't coming from Senator Obama. When I did a search on SFGate.com, the Chronicle's search engine, on "obama speech dayton," I found a single AP article that referred to Obama's Dayton appearance as follows, in total:

In Dayton, Ohio, on Tuesday, the crowd waiting for Obama to take the stage chanted "No pit bulls! No pit bulls!" — a reference to Palin's joke that lipstick is the only thing that sets hockey moms like her apart from the dogs.

I'm not sure that's evidence that Senator Obama has been distracted by Governor Palin.

If I may venture another opinion here: Don't believe everything you read in the paper! And I'm incredulous at the number of opinions out there masquerading as fact. It's egregious.