First, on the Republican side - not much going on here anymore. The biggest thing is that Romney has officially backed McCain, and asked his delegates to switch over. Former Senator Rick Santorum also writes that the jury is still out on McCain. Conservatives are still collectively undecided about whether to back a nominee that they do not believe represents them or to tank the election on purpose and accept whatever disaster the Democrat victory will bring on. Time will tell.
Now, the Democrat side, where things are really cooking. First, the obvious. Hillary Clinton's campaign is in total disarray:
[T]he campaign has something of a shellshocked feel, as staffers privately chew over a blowup last week where internal frictions flared into the open. Clinton campaign operatives say it happened as top Clinton advisers gathered in Arlington, Va., campaign headquarters to preview a TV commercial. "Your ad doesn't work," strategist Mark Penn yelled at ad-maker Mandy Grunwald. "The execution is all wrong," he said, according to the operatives.
"Oh, it's always the ad, never the message," Ms. Grunwald fired back, say the operatives. The clash got so heated that political director Guy Cecil left the room, saying, "I'm out of here."
That stress could be partly the result of polls now showing Obama has a double digit lead in the national race. If Obama continues to win, he may render the question of superdelegates moot (but both Clinton and Obama are giving huge sums of campaign cash to superdelegates anyway). Conventional wisdom says that if Obama wins the next few states, he's a lock. Of course, conventional wisdom is often wrong - it's far from over. Witness the wealth of problems that Obama faces.
John Mark Reynolds writes about five reasons Obama is overrated:
1. McCain ties Obama in favorable press.
2. Obama almost never polls over fifty-percent in national polls and is leading McCain very narrowly.
3. Obama has never run in a competitive race against a well-funded Republican.
4. Obama has a voting record that is almost entirely unknown to the public.
5. A fired up base (Republicans in 2000) is no sign of victory.
The USA Today runs a story about Democrats' increasing concern that Obama has yet to show any substance. While he is a great orator, he hasn't given any specific details on most of his policies. "Historically, while hope may well sell in the spring, it wears thin by fall when it is trumped by issues of security and experience," said one long-time Democrat activist.
Charles Krauthammer agrees, saying Obama has essentially found a way to get people to buy something that costs nothing: hope.
Obama has an astonishingly empty paper trail. He's going around issuing promissory notes on the future that he can't possibly redeem. Promises to heal the world with negotiations with the likes of Iran's President Ahmadinejad. Promises to transcend the conundrums of entitlement reform that require real and painful trade-offs and that have eluded solution for a generation. Promises to fund his other promises by a rapid withdrawal from an unpopular war -- with the hope, I suppose, that the (presumed) resulting increase in American prestige would compensate for the chaos to follow.
Democrats are worried that the Obama spell will break between the time of his nomination and the time of the election, and deny them the White House. My guess is that he can maintain the spell just past Inauguration Day. After which will come the awakening. It will be rude.
On the few things that Obama actually has given details, they are not pretty. For example, his spending plans for your tax dollars are almost as ambitious as Clinton's. Take a quick look at the Obama Spend-o-Meter to get an idea of what he is proposing - almost $1 trillion of new spending!!! But, the sheer spending isn't the only problem with Obama's financial plan. Lawrence Kudlow writes that Obama's plan to fix every ill with more taxes and spending underlines his worldview of pessimism:
Obama wants you to believe that America is in trouble, and that it can only be cured with a big lurch to the left. Take from the rich and give to the non-rich. Redistribute income and wealth. It's an age-old recipe for economic disaster. It completely ignores incentives for entrepreneurs, small family-owned businesses, and investors. You can't have capitalism without capital. But Obama would penalize capital, be it capital from corporations or investors. This will only harm, and not advance, opportunities for middle-class workers.
Obama believes he can use government, and not free markets, to drive the economy. But on taxes, trade, and regulation, Obama's program is anti-growth. A President Obama would steer us in the social-market direction of Western Europe, which has produced only stagnant economies down through the years. It would be quite an irony. While newly emerging nations in Eastern Europe and Asia are lowering the tax penalties on capital -- and reaping the economic rewards -- Obama would raise them. Low-rate flat-tax plans are proliferating around the world. Yet Obama completely ignores this. American competitiveness would suffer enormously under Obama, as would job opportunities, productivity, and real wages.
Imitate the failures of Germany, Norway, and Sweden? That's no way to run economic policy.
Richard Baehr writes about what it would take to beat Obama. Some excellent excerpts:
Senator Obama is a first term Senator, inexperienced in matters of war and national security, a huge tax-and-spend liberal, and the holder of the most left wing voting record of all 100 US Senators.
[T]he question becomes: will voters in the next nine months learn this information about Obama and ratify that vision for the presidency, or just continue to be carried away with his fluffy high minded rhetoric about change, and unity, and hope?
If Obama is the nominee and he is elected, once he is in office, he will have to govern. Speeches will not be enough. For a candidate who has never run anything more than a Senate staff of a bit more than a dozen people and his campaign team, and has all of 3 years in national politics (one of them on the campaign trail), being green does not begin to describe his inexperience.
We have had other candidates ascend to the Presidency with high minded visions of change, and decency and hope and unity. Some of them even have had executive experience. One of these was Jimmy Carter, who had what is generally considered the most failed Presidency of the last 50 years. For those who will offer George Bush as a better example of a failed Presidency, note that Bush was re-elected and won more votes than any candidate in history (62 million), securing 51% of all votes cast. He carried 31 states. When Carter ran for re-election, he won 6 states with 49 Electoral votes, and received but 40% of the popular vote. That is evidence that the American people considered Carter's a failed Presidency.
Carter, as President, was often hostile to allies, as he pushed a human rights agenda. He abandoned the Shah of Iran, and after he was forced out we were left with the Ayatollah Khomeini. Would a hasty Obama withdrawal from Iraq produce something similar? In Afghanistan, the Russians sensed Carter's weakness, and brazenly invaded the country. Carter's response was an Olympic boycott. Is there reason to think that Al Qaeda, Iran and Syria, and Palestinian terrorists might think a President Obama will not pursue the struggle with radical Islam the way President Bush did, and see opportunities to test his will?
On the domestic front, Carter left a legacy to his successor of high inflation, high unemployment, high interest rates, and what he called malaise. Is there enough revenue from taxing the so-called rich to support all the projects a President Obama has in mind? How many times can you take away the same Bush tax cuts and use it for different new spending programs?
Does any of this sound familiar? Obama would sit down and talk with Iran (an avowed enemy) but would attack Pakistan (an ally with nukes). He proposes massive new taxes and regulations. All he's got is his inspirational message of 'change', but he hasn't explained much of what that change is, and what he has explained is disastrous. Do we want another Carter?
Regardless of who ultimately wins the nomination, David Brooks writes of a problem that the Democrat party will inevitably face. He explains that the Republican party is at war over policy, but the Democrat war isn't. But, once in the White House, the winner will immediately split the party. The first thing will be Iraq:
Both Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have seductively hinted that they would withdraw almost all U.S. troops within 12 to 16 months. But if either of them actually did that, he or she would instantly make Iraq the consuming partisan fight of their presidency.
There would be private but powerful opposition from Arab leaders, who would fear a return to 2006 chaos. There would be irate opposition from important sections of the military, who would feel that the U.S. was squandering the gains of the previous year. A Democratic president with few military credentials would confront outraged and highly photogenic colonels screaming betrayal. There would be important criticism from nonpartisan military experts.
There would be furious opposition from Republicans and many independents. They would argue that you can't evacuate troops just as Iraqis are about to hold national elections and tensions are at their highest. They would point out that it's insanity to end local reconstruction and Iraqi training efforts just when they are producing results. They would accuse the new administration of reverse-Rumsfeldism, of ignoring postsurge realities and of imposing an ideological solution on a complex situation.
All dreams of changing the tone in Washington would be gone. All of Obama's unity hopes would evaporate. And if the situation did deteriorate after a quick withdrawal, as the National Intelligence Estimate warns, the bloodshed would be on the new president's head.
But to not withdraw would cause conniptions of the far-Left anti-war crowd which swept them into the White House in the first place. Then comes the second great divider, domestic spending:
Both campaigns now promise fiscal discipline, as well as ambitious new programs. These kinds of have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too vows were merely laughable last year when the federal deficit was running at a manageable $163 billion a year. But the economic slowdown, the hangover from the Bush years and the growing bite of entitlements mean that the federal deficit will almost certainly top $400 billion by 2009. The accumulated national debt will be in shouting distance of the $10 trillion mark. With that much red ink, the primary-season spending plans are simply ridiculous.
Both are brutal choices, and both require violating half of the winner's campaign promises.
Baehr sums up well (in my opinion) with his conclusion:
Over the next nine months, the Republicans will have the opportunity, unless Hillary Clinton is successful in the next month or so, of bringing Obama to the ground and talking about substance, and what his Presidency would be like, rather than the ethereal subjects like future versus the past, change versus more of the same, hope versus despair.
Obama has the high ground and will win if the focus remains his chosen lofty themes. If the focus of the fall campaign is the reality of governing, he is beatable.
So, much of the minefield remains for Obama to cross. He's the clear leader in the Democrat nomination race, but he faces a lot of thorny problems when it comes to the general election against the right candidate. My question is whether or not McCain will be that candidate, and hold Obama's feet to the fire, making him lay out his plans. Hillary has tried that and appears to be failing...will McCain succeed? Time will tell.
There's my two cents.
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