Why Is The Mighty Obamessiah Struggling Mightily?

It's no secret that the race between the Obamessiah and mere mortal John McCain is essentially even.  Though McCain trails in most polls (but not all), he's within the margin of error on almost all of them, so it's a statistical tie.  The key question that both candidates need to answer is: why?  Whichever candidate best identifies the correct answer(s) will likely win in November.  I've come across several outstanding opinion pieces that all seem very plausible.  This post is a bit long, but please read all the way through - it's good stuff!

First, we have the most recent debacle for the Obamessiah: his indefensible defense of abortion to the point of infanticide.  Kathleen Parker suggests that not being on the wrong side of the issue is only a part of his problem here:

Abortion is back with, dare we say it, biblical vengeance.

Republicans recently have been focused on Barack Obama's opposition several years ago to "born alive" legislation in Illinois that mirrored similar federal legislation aimed at granting personhood to a fetus/baby that was alive after removal from its mother's body, either by abortion or premature birth.

In the past few weeks, Obama has been accused of everything from favoring infanticide to lying about his vote, to inventing a cover-up, to being a baby-killing extremist.

Politics is no place for the squeamish.

What is more likely true is that Obama is studiously cautious, too smart by half, and ambivalent to a fault. Suddenly, the man whose campaign seemed helium-propelled is being pulled back down to Earth by the force of his own vagueness. Abortion, of all things, has become his kryptonite.

She goes on to recap the premise and chronology of the events (which I've already done extensively, so I won't get into it again), and asks the key question: did he intentionally oppose the infanticide ban, or did he simply misunderstand it?

Alas, the more he tries to explain his position, the more muddled the picture becomes and the more confused voters are. The most revealing answer may have come when pastor Rick Warren asked the Illinois senator when a baby gets human rights.

"Well, uh, you know, I think that whether you're looking at it from a theological perspective or, uh, a scientific perspective, uh, answering that question with specificity, uh, you know, is, is, uh, above my pay grade."

Well, uh, not really.

Yes, Warren's question was complicated, especially if you're a politician afraid of saying the wrong thing. But the answer is really pretty simple. It's whatever one thinks. It is not above anyone's pay grade to be honest.

Instead, Obama punted.

Americans are accustomed to differing views on abortion and will tolerate a flip-flop now and then. But a politician who finesses or fudges out of an instinct to please will be viewed as either spineless or insecure or both -- none of which inspires confidence.

I think Parker's hit on something.  Not only are the pro-lifers all over this one, but even the pro-choicers are uneasy at the thought that he may have supported infanticide (whether intentionally or not).  Regardless, his numerous evolving explanations and the total flub at Saddleback have underscored the fact that he is either morally bankrupt or supremely unqualified.   No matter your thoughts on the actual issue, it's awfully hard to respect someone (and support them as your leader) who can't even answer a direct question.  We want thoughtfulness and introspection in our spiritual leaders; in our President, we want decisiveness and strength.  Obama presented neither.

Gerard Baker at the U.K. Times Online has a different take.  He thinks that Obama shined as long as the spotlight wasn't on him, but since he more or less wrapped up the nomination that's squarely where the spotlight has been:

There's trouble in paradise. Cancel the coronation. Send back the commemorative medals. Put those "Yes We Can" T-shirts up on eBay. Keep the Change.

Barack Obama's historic procession to the American presidency has been rudely interrupted. The global healing he promised is in jeopardy. If you're prone to emotional breakdown, you might want to take a seat before I say this. He might not win.

How can it be, you ask? Didn't we see him just last month speaking to 200,000 adoring Germans in Berlin? Didn't he get the red carpet treatment in France - France of all places? Doesn't every British politician want to be seen clutching the hem of his garment?

All true. But as cruel geography and the selfish designs of the American Founding Fathers would have it, Europeans don't get to choose the US president. Somewhere along the way to the Obama presidency, somebody forgot to ask the American people.

Baker's satirical writing is not only a treat to read, but it delivers a serious point: Americans haven't bought into the savior status of the Obamessiah to nearly the degree that Europe has.  The change has come from three reasons:

First, it's true that the negative campaigning by John McCain has hurt him somewhat. But there's nothing wrong with that. The 2008 presidential election has so far been a referendum on Senator Obama. It's perfectly reasonable for the Republicans to make the case against him, and the attacks have been fair.

The fact is that the 47-year-old Democrat, less than four years in the Senate, is still largely a blank page for American voters: a great orator and an attractive figure, but unknown and untested. The Republicans have been filling in some of the gaps and pointing out how thin his real biography is.

The second problem is that Senator Obama is having difficulty - curiously enough - with Democratic voters. Polls indicate that while Senator McCain has just about locked up the votes of those who supported other Republicans in the primary election, Senator Obama is still regarded with mistrust and dislike by large numbers of Hillary Clinton's former supporters.

For many of these working-class types, he's just a bit too cerebral, a little vague. His campaign lacks both substance and passion. While unemployment is rising, incomes are slipping fqarther behind rising inflation and house prices are falling, Senator Obama keeps talking about hope and change, keeps promising a new type of politics. These benighted Democratic voters don't really want a new type of politics. They want to know what exactly he's going to do to raise their living standards.

The third problem is that events have not helped the Democrats. The war in Georgia has emphasised that the world is a dangerous place, and that simply being willing to talk to your enemies, as Senator Obama sometimes seems to suggest, isn't going to keep your people safe.

The irony for Senator Obama is that he has built a campaign on a pledge to put an end to cynicism in the political system, but the more he offers only vague promises of hope, the greater the danger that he increases voter cynicism about politicians in general and him in particular.

The short version: the Obamessiah is an elitist, and not even rank-and-file Democrats appreciate that.  He's also revealing that he is long on sweeping promises to heal the world, but extremely short on actual solutions that would solve real problems for real people.

That leads us into Jonah Goldberg's humorous opinion at RealClearPolitics.com:

The Democrats are having their flop-sweat moment. Barack Obama should be way out in front. The Republicans are in terrible shape. There hasn't been a more battered brand name since Bart Simpson swallowed a jagged metal "O" from his box of Krusty-O's cereal. The GOP has nominated an old white-haired dude, in Paris Hilton's words, who makes Dick Cheney look like a lambada champion. He'll be the kind of president who will yell from the Oval Office window, "You kids get off my lawn!" The economy isn't roadkill quite yet; it's sort of like wounded roadkill, flopping around, unable to get going but unwilling to lay down and die.

And yet, John McCain is pulling ahead of Obama.

Ask the typical Obama supporter why this should be so and you'll get a range of answers. Some just stare at the poll numbers the way my late basset hound would look at me when I tried to feed him a grape: with pure unblinking incomprehension. Others act like the guy who sits alone with his shopping bags at the public library, muttering about Fox News conspiracies and how Karl Rove-like aliens are doing terrible things with probes of proctological exactitude. Still others just shake their heads at the racism of anyone who could possibly have a problem with a very left-wing politician with almost no experience, who often sounds like his campaign slogan is: "People of Earth! Stop Your Bickering. I Am From Harvard, And I'm Here To Help."

Perhaps therein lies the answer to this supposed mystery. Indeed, perhaps there's no mystery at all, and Obama's problems are the same problems Democrats always have at the presidential level: He's an elitist.

Liberalism is often a problem at the presidential level. Cultural liberalism is a burden. Haughty cultural liberalism is a disaster in the making. For good or ill, the presidency is a cultural institution as much as it is a political institution. And it's fundamentally a culturally conservative one. Fair or not, many perceive Obama as a cultural outsider.

Michael Barone noticed during the primaries that, with the exception of the black vote, Obama's support within the Democratic party is comprised almost entirely of cultural liberals. He dubbed this intra-Democratic split a divide between "academics and Jacksonians." The Jacksonians are working-class, culturally conservative whites. The academics are the same people who formed the base for Howard Dean, Bill Bradley, Michael Dukakis, Gary Hart, George McGovern, and other successful presidents in the anti-matter universe where Spock has a goatee.

In this universe, however, you need Jacksonians more than you need academics to win a general election, which is one reason why no non-southern Democrat has won the presidency in nearly a half-century.

If we also include the Obamessiah's complaint about the price of arugula in Iowa (yeah, I don't know what arugula is, either), sniffing about how Southerners cling to God and guns, and his wife whining about how difficult it is when a $600 stimulus check is only enough to buy a pair of earrings, is it any wonder that normal Americans get that elitist vibe?  That's the funny (and dangerous) thing about liberals - they geniuinely don't understand why the rest of us think they're a bunch of hypocritical, elitist idiots.

Finally, I think Peggy Noonan has hit the nail most closely on the head.  Following Occam's Razor theory -- the simplest explanation is the best one -- she has deduced that the change is due primarily to the fact that people are just now starting to pay attention.  The political class has been watching the Obamessiah's meteoric rise for a couple of years now, but most Americans don't give a rat's patootie about politics until the election is just around the corner (if even then).

[Americans see an] attractive, intelligent man, interesting, but—he's hard to categorize. Is he Gen. Obama? No, no military background. Brilliant Businessman Obama? No, he never worked in business. Famous Name Obama? No, it's a new name, an unusual one. Longtime Southern Governor Obama? No. He's a community organizer (what's that?), then a lawyer (boo), then a state legislator (so what, so's my cousin), then U.S. senator (less than four years!).

There is no pre-existing category for him.

Add to that the wear and tear of Jeremiah Wright, secret Muslim rumors, media darling and, this week, abortion.

It took a toll, which led to a readjustment. His uniqueness, once his great power, is now his great problem.

McCain, on the other hand, is very categorizable: solid, POW/war hero, cranky, a known entity.

As in many things, timing is everything:

The Rick Warren debate mattered. Why? It took place at exactly the moment America was starting to pay attention. This is what it looked like by the end of the night: Mr. McCain, normal. Mr. Obama, not normal. You've seen this discussed elsewhere. Mr. McCain was direct and clear, Mr. Obama both more careful and more scattered. But on abortion in particular, Mr. McCain seemed old-time conservative, which is something we all understand, whether we like such a stance or not, and Mr. Obama seemed either radical or dodgy. He is "in favor . . . of limits" on late-term abortions, though some would consider those limits "inadequate."

As I watched I thought: How about "Let the baby live"? Don't parse it. Just "Let the baby live."

As to the question when human life begins, the answer to which is above Mr. Obama's pay grade, oh, let's go on a little tear. You know why they call it birth control? Because it's meant to stop a birth from happening nine months later. We know when life begins. Everyone who ever bought a pack of condoms knows when life begins.

To put it another way, with conception something begins. What do you think it is? A car? A 1948 Buick?

If you want to argue whether legal abortion is morally defensible, have at it and go to it, but Mr. Obama's answers here seemed to me strange and disturbing.

I have to say that of all the common sense abortion arguments I've heard or read, Noonan's is the best.  Of course we know when life begins, or we wouldn't try to prevent conception!  It's awfully hard to argue with that logic.

Anyway, Noonan predicts Obama will give a good convention speech, but suggests that the real speech to watch will be McCain's because he has no expectations.

But Mr. McCain provided, in 2004, one of the most exciting and certainly the most charged moment of the Republican Convention, when he looked up at Michael Moore in the press stands and said, "Our choice wasn't between a benign status quo and the bloodshed of war, it was between war and a greater threat. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. . . . And certainly not a disingenuous filmmaker who would have us believe that Saddam's Iraq was an oasis of peace." It blew the roof off. And the smile he gave Mr. Moore was one of pure, delighted malice. When Mr. McCain comes to play, he comes to play.

Look for a certain populist stance. He signaled it this week in Politico. He called lobbyists "birds of prey" in pursuit of "their share of the spoils." Great stuff. (Boy, will he have trouble staffing his White House.)

Read the article for the full effect of her arguments.

The point of these articles above is that there has been a distinct shift in the political winds in recent weeks, and it's not in favor of the Obamessiah.  It is likely that elements of all of these opinions are part of the shift, though we'll probably never fully understand what has happened.  Still, we can apply our intelligence to our experience and make our best judgment call on how we've gotten to where we are, and whoever does that best will have a distinct advantage moving forward after the conventions.

In any case, Barack the Obamessiah appears to be losing his poise and getting desperate, making foolish statements (even more than usual) and convulsing his symantecs, desperately trying to break free of self-induced scandals.  If nothing else, Americans don't respect blatant pandering and endless revisions of positions.  That's all Obama's done recently, and that's another reason he's struggling.

There's my two cents.