Uh-Oh

The super-super-delegates are getting nervous. They want Obama to start acting more like Hillary:

“I particularly hope he strengthens his economic message — even Senator Obama can speak more clearly and specifically about the kitchen-table, bread-and-butter issues like high energy costs,” said Gov. Ted Strickland of Ohio. “It’s fine to tell people about hope and change, but you have to have plenty of concrete, pragmatic ideas that bring hope and change to life.” Or, in the blunter words of Gov. Phil Bredesen, Democrat of Tennessee: “Instead of giving big speeches at big stadiums, he needs to give straight-up 10-word answers to people at Wal-Mart about how he would improve their lives.”

Be careful what you wish for. It’s a little late in the game for a makeover, and Barack won't look comfortable hiding his light under a bushel so he can drone on about farm policy. He'll just be prompting voters to ask themselves how a man with no previous accomplishments is going implement all his wonderful specifics.


If morphing himself into a compassionate wonk doesn't work, there's always Plan B. Ultimately, the candidate of hope and change may be forced to run a simple scorched-earth campaign portraying John McCain as an older, scarier George W. Bush.

Whatever it takes to win.

One Degree of Lieber-ation

If McCain puts this douchebag on the ticket, I'll vote for Obama, if only to contribute in some small way to Joementum's third consecutive coast-to-coast smackdown.

On the flip side, nothing better illustrates Democratic spinelessness during the Bush years than the Party's treatment of Ned Lamont in 2006. As you'll recall, it was so important to Harry Reid and Company that the Senate not be deprived of Lieberman's wise counsel that they wouldn't lift a finger to help elect a real Democrat, even after Lamont won the Connecticut primary. (Barbara Boxer still has some explaining to do.)

No one--including Hillary Clinton--gets any props for this travesty, but Obama's behavior was too much even for Lord Kos. If Barack manages to get himself elected, I hope he doesn't look to the party leadership for continued guidance. The prospect of Obama, Reid, Dean and Pelosi marching arm-in-arm down the yellow brick road to take power is a bit nauseating.

Nothing Is Ever Barack's Fault, Part 217

Hillary Clinton wanted no part of Mark Penn's suggestion that she attack Obama for being insufficiently All-American. Nevertheless, Greg Sargent writes:

The question, of course, is how does the idea that senior advisers and Hillary rejected Penn's approach square with the fact that the Reverend Jeremiah Wright (along with other associations) became such a big issue in the campaign? Ultimately the media broke the Wright story, though that hardly rules out the possibility that some Hillary advisers were partly responsible for making that happen.

When the Wright story broke, the Hillary camp was initially reticent about it for a time, until Hillary herself responded to a question at an edit board meeting by saying: "He would not have been my pastor."

Wrong answer, Hillary. You needed to have Barack's back at all times. Of course, now you'd have to throw Rev. Wright under your own bus. Oh, wait--

You don't have one, loser!

Edwards Fallout

Josh Marshall sees big trouble ahead for John McCain:

Just as Bill Clinton's public undressing in the Lewinsky scandal led indirectly to the exposure of several high-profile Republican affairs, Edwards' revelation will inevitably put pressure on the press in general to scrutinize John McCain under something more searching than the JFK rules they've applied to date. I assure you that this dimension of the story occurred to every reporter even tangentially involved in reporting this race soon after the Edwards story hit yesterday afternoon.

Sexual misconduct alone won't take down a good politician. Two additional factors are usually required: hypocrisy and a skimpy record of accomplishment. Bill Clinton and Larry "Wide Stance" Craig lost a little dignity, but were able to survive; John Edwards and Eliot Spitzer became instant roadkill. If Josh and his press pals think they have something on McCain, they'd better come up with more than the Iseman Affair or a few gin-soaked tales of post-Vietnam debauchery. Unless a McCain sex scandal involves recent and egregiously irresponsible behavior or the pitter-patter of little (or even not-so-little!) feet, it will backfire on whoever tries to peddle it.


Few things are as loathsome as the spectacle of the media in full Moral Outrage Mode, but they're correct when they point out that Edwards' phoniness turned out to be genuine. We didn't really know the guy at all. That's why the Edwards "revelation," should it become lodged in the public consciousness, has the potential to damage Barack Obama. Obama, like Edwards, is fundamentally a mystery man with no accomplishments who is all about talk and image rather than character. (I'm not vouching for McCain, and I would never vote for him. I'm just saying I don't know who Obama is. That's his problem, not mine. He's running too early.)

PUMAs are having all the fun!

By the end of her presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton was firing on all cylinders. She had jettisoned (too late!) the idiotic Mark Penn and was at last making a compelling case for herself. Even as a corrupt Democratic Party Establishment and a savagely gleeful media were evicting her from the race, her supporters were embracing and internalizing a vision of the country under her leadership. (They had already concluded that Barack Obama was an extremely weak candidate, both politically and substantively.)

Meanwhile, Obama himself seemed to have fallen under the influence of Mark Penn's evil twin. His campaign had essentially adopted the "inevitability" strategy that proved so catastrophic for Hillary. Loyal Obamabots (when they weren't trashing the Clintons) did little but pound away at the arcane details of the Delegate Math in an attempt to make Hillary go away. The strategy worked, but not without a cost.

Euphoric (if ungracious) in victory, Obama supporters looked forward to getting back to spreading their progressive message of Hope and Change to the broader electorate. Alas, Barack had other plans. In accordance with his "post-partisan" general election strategy, he immediately engaged in a frenzy of sellouts and flip-flops which, had they come from Hillary Clinton, would have led to her being tarred and feathered on the major blogs all the way to Denver.

Obamabots might have taken their medicine without complaint if their man's numbers had remained strong, but as they watched all traces of his Excellent European Adventure vanish into the polling ether, and as they now see John McCain's heretofore pitifully unfocused campaign come out of its stupor, they're beginning to get restless. Some have become supplicants:

. . .You stand today at the head of a movement that believes deeply in the change you have claimed as the mantle of your campaign. The millions who attend your rallies, donate to your campaign and visit your website are a powerful testament to this new movement’s energy and passion. . . .We recognize that compromise is necessary in any democracy. We understand that the pressures brought to bear on those seeking the highest office are intense. But retreating from the stands that have been the signature of your campaign will weaken the movement whose vigorous backing you need in order to win and then deliver the change you have promised.

(Can a sternly worded letter be far behind?)

Others are just grouchy:

So frankly, Obama should be blowing McCain out of the water. Congressional approval ratings are hovering at 9% and Bush is in the high twenties and has been for years, so this is a realigning period. That Obama is in the high forties and McCain is in the low forties seems to be leaving a lot of votes on the table. That might change, I'm not making an argument about what the campaign should or should not do, as they have a strategy and it's more important for them to execute their strategy effectively than to do what outsiders in the cheap seats think they should do. I'm just pointing out why it feels so awful for movement progressives.

Everybody's very polite, but clearly the thrill is gone, and it's not coming back. Obama supporters are looking at three months of trench warfare against the Republicans, and all they they can really talk about anymore is the awfulness of John McCain.

No wonder PUMAs get so many Obamabots into a lather. Quixotic as their cause may be, they don't have to fake anything.

Obama : Clinton : : Symbol : Wonk (I'll take the Wonk)

Over at MyDD and TPM they're mad at Dana Milbank. They think he's quoting Obama out of context when he writes:

Inside, according to a witness, he told the House members, "This is the moment . . . that the world is waiting for," adding: "I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions."

The full context, according to the blogger boys, should have included the following:

A Dem leadership aide who was in the room has emailed me and other reporters this: "His entire point of that riff was that the campaign IS NOT about him. The Post left out the important first half of the sentence, which was something along the lines of: 'It has become increasingly clear in my travel, the campaign, that the crowds, the enthusiasm, 200,000 people in Berlin, is not about me at all. It's about America. I have just become a symbol ... ."

That's the context that's supposed to make Obama look humble? He's informing an audience of Congress Critters that even though millions of people see him as the symbol of American Greatness, it's not really about Barack at all! It reminds me of the old line about the egotistical Hollywood actor who says, "But enough about me. What do you think of me?" He's not fooling anyone.

Barack Obama is no less arrogant than George W. Bush. After 9/11, Bush was able to make his particular brand of arrogance work for him politically. It's doubtful that Obama can pull that off, but the real problem is not his abundant self-esteem, it's his view of himself as a "symbol." In this, he is absolutely correct, and it's the reason he will be a weak president.

Bill and Hillary Clinton are not symbols. They are policy wonks with out-sized public personalities who can survive--and sometimes thrive--without the help of the corporate media. Obama's political strength derives from his exploitation of a cool, carefully constructed and strangely impersonal image as a unifying symbol of hope. Under no circumstances may he allow that image to be tarnished, which is why he will never engage in any serious battles with forces on the right. He'll cave if he has to.

That's why he's so hard to pin down on substance.

Another Nervous Nellie in Obama Land

Remember when the Netroots told us that Barack walked on water and Hillary was pond scum? Well, it turns out she might have to be on the ticket. The Democratic Party is experiencing an enthusisam shortfall:

As I said, my first choice is Biden. But beyond that is my determination that we win. And that may, I said may, require the excitement -- the big bump -- that would be produced by the picture of these two fighters joining hands and joining forces. They looked amazing in Unity, New Hampshire. Maybe that show needs to go national.

If Obama's not exciting enough, then what good is he? He can't run on his record, because he doesn't have one. (He's the anti-Nixon.) The truth is that his political survival requires that he surround himself with a protective aura of positive buzz. The problem is that he's not brand-new anymore. He's new (anybody's new compared to McCain!) but he's not brand-new. From now on, positive buzz about Obama will have to be manufactured. (I doubt he'll ever again get 200,000 Germans to listen to him speak, unless he actually does something.)

People don't necessarily object to being manipulated by politicians--or movie studios or advertisers or sports teams--but they're not going to buy what they don't think they need. We know from the primaries that Obama doesn't wear well. It wasn't just that Clinton got stronger. Obama himself seemed to evaporate upon exposure to real people and real problems. An essential phoniness came through.

It's no surprise that Obama's trip abroad isn't giving him a bounce in the polls. It's such an obvious photo-op extravaganza that it merely reinforces what makes voters uneasy about him in the first place. The powder-puff press coverage--complete with a full body massage by Brian Williams on the Nightly News--isn't helping. Everybody knows that unless Obama acts like Chevy Chase in European Vacation, the media is going to make him president-in-waiting. The whole thing has all the credibility of professional wrestling.

M. J. Rosenberg is as doctrinaire an Obamabot--and Clinton-hater--as you'll find in the blogosphere. If he's sending out an SOS to Hillary, you know they're scared.