Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Obamessiah Update

The rock star candidate is still all over the place, so let's take a look at what he's been up to.  Unfortunately for him, he's still slipping.  In several recent polls (Massachusetts, Florida, overall), McCain continues to gain ground.  Part of this slide is because Obama has serious problems with women.  Obviously, this is a huge voting bloc, and if they ditch him, he's toast.  Obama is also hopelessly outmatched by McCain on foreign policy (despite boasting over 300 advisers...apparently, none of them are any good), which is a critical issue to many people.  Between parroting the party line for years and spouting gaffe after gaffe, Obama is daily proving himself unready for the White House, and Americans are starting to see it.  A major blow to Obama was his recent world tour, which included a speech in Berlin where he essentially touted himself as a citizen of the world rather than a candidate for President of the United States.  As Rich Lowry points out, Americans don't want a trans-national President.  We want an American first, someone who is proud of America.  Obama is neither.

There are also a number of questions about Obama's background and true beliefs which are slowly seeping into the public consciousness.  His position on abortion offends many, and here's another cautionary story about it.  His sheer slipperiness makes many people uneasy, and rightfully so.  When he isn't taking both sides of an issue, he has a tendency to inflate his own importance or take credit for the work of other people.  He tries to be all things to all people at all times, and that is simply not possible.  Despite the massive shielding effort by his shills in the MSM, people are starting to see his standard mode of operations, and they're becoming increasingly nervous about him.  They have seen that he is not a new kind of politician at all, but rather the typical silver-tongued double-speaker they've come to distrust and despise.  Some on the right are actually thankful for him, because he illustrates beautifully how bankrupt and disastrous liberal policies are.  His elitism and stealth socialism is becoming more and more widely known, and it's eroding his support from normal Americans of all stripes.  You know it's bad when the New York Times questions why Obama is only neck and neck in a race that should have been a landslide.

It also doesn't help that he has consistently ducked McCain's challenges for debates.  People are starting to wonder why he is afraid to take on McCain.  He's going to have to man up if he wants to recover some of his image; the problem, though, is that McCain will chew him up and spit him out.  Obama appears to be calculating that he'll take less political damage from being a chicken than from getting pummeled.  If he can't handle a debate or two with McCain, how is he going to handle the tough negotiations he keeps promising against Iran and the like?

He is also revealing himself to be a politician of expedience rather than ideals, despite what he says in his speeches.  His latest position change is on oil drilling.  First he said we couldn't drill our way out of this problem.  Then he suggested we simply inflate our tires properly.  Now he supports some limited drilling.  Okay, so what?  McCain changed his position on that, too, right?  What's the difference?  McCain changed once, before the whole drilling movement had stirred in the American people.  By switching only now, when poll after poll shows the vast majority of Americans support drilling, Obama appears to be changing his position purely based on political expediency.  This is not leadership, it is following by popularity, and many Americans don't respect this sort of weakness.

The bottom line is that Obama is a tremendously weak candidate, and is becoming weaker by the day as America better understands who he is and what he wants to do.  That's bad for the Obamessiah, but very, very good for the American people.

With about three full months still to go before the general election, McCain's chances look better than ever.

There's my two cents.

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