Lower in the water and tipping toward the starboard

Alex Castellanos, at HuffPo, admires Obama’s luck, but notes that he does have grave vulnerabilities.

Grave enough that, despite Ted Stevens and a triumphant European vacation, Obama’s sinking poll numbers are making headlines.

The best campaign against Barack Obama is not being run by his opponent, but by Barack Obama. It is Obama’s campaign that presents their candidate as an ever-changing work-in-progress. It is his own campaign that occludes our ability to know this man, depicting him as authentic as a pair of designer jeans.

To earn the Democratic nomination, as Fred Thompson points out, Obama ran as George McGovern without the experience, a left-of-center politician who would meet unconditionally with Iran, pull us precipitously out of Iraq, prohibit new drilling for oil, and grow big government in Washington by all but a trillion dollars. In his general election TV ad debut, however, Obama pirouetted like Baryshnikov. With a commercial Mike Huckabee could have run in a Republican primary, Obama now emphasizes his commitment to strong families and heartland values, “Accountability and self-reliance. Love of country. Working hard without making excuses.” In this yet unwritten chapter of his next autobiography, Obama tells us he is the candidate of “welfare to work” who supports our troops and “cut taxes for working families.” The shift in his political personae has been startling. Obama has moved right so far and so fast, he could end up McCain’s Vice-Presidential pick.

General-election Obama now billboards his doubts about affirmative action. He has embraced the Bush Doctrine of pre-emption saying, “I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon…everything.” He tells his party “Democrats are not for a bigger government.” Oil drilling is a consideration. His FISA vote and abandonment of public campaign finance introduce us to an Obama of recent invention. And as he abandons his old identity for the new, breeding disenchantment among his formerly passionate left-of-center supporters and, equally, doubts among the center he courts, he risks becoming nothing at all, a candidate who is everything and nothing in the same moment.

I guess that European coronation backfired. The latest Zogby poll shows McCain slightly in the lead.

A national Associated TV/Zogby International telephone poll of 1,011 likely voters conducted July 31-Aug. 1 finds Republican Sen. John McCain taking a razor-thin 42%-41% lead over Democrat Sen. Barack Obama in the race for the U.S. presidency.

The margin between the candidates is statistically insignificant, but demonstrates a notable turn-around from the Reuters/Zogby poll of July 7-9 that showed Obama ahead, 46%-36% in a four-way match-up that included Libertarian candidate Bob Barr of Georgia and liberal independent candidate Ralph Nader. McCain made significant gains at Obama’s expense among some of what had been Obama’s strongest demographic groups. For example:

McCain gained 20% and Obama lost 16% among voters ages 18-29. Obama still leads that group, 49%-38%.

Among women, McCain closed 10 points on Obama, who still leads by a 43%-38% margin.

Obama has lost what was an 11% lead among Independents. He and McCain are now tied.

Obama had some slippage among Democrats, dropping from 83% to 74%.

Obama’s support among single voters dropped by 19%, and he now leads McCain, 51%-37%.

Even with African-Americans and Hispanics, Obama shows smaller margins.

The survey results come as Obama, fresh off what had been characterized as a triumphant tour of the Middle East and Europe, including a speech to 200,000 Germans in Berlin. That trip quickly became fodder for an aggressive response ad by the McCain campaign that questioned whether Obama’s popularity around the world meant he was ready to lead the U.S.

Praise the One.

1:14 video

Can you tell Barack Obama from a pop culture celebrity? Take this 8 question quiz and find out.

Hat tip to Daniel Moloney.

An LA Times political blog reports that Obama’s numbers have been plummeting. According to the Gallup Poll, last Sunday Obama was enjoying a 49 to 40 lead over John McCain. By Wednesday, his advantage had declined to 45 – 44, a change of 9 points, making the race a statistical dead heat.

It’s really much too early for Obama to collapse. He hasn’t even been nominated yet.

Shelby Steele recently identified the implicit deal that made Barack Obama’s candidacy so appealing to ordinary white Americans outside the democrat party base: Elect Obama the first American black president, and the country finally has officially moved beyond racial politics and racial grievances.

Obama… became the first viable black presidential candidate precisely by giving up his moral leverage over whites.

Mr. Obama’s great political ingenuity was very simple: to trade moral leverage for gratitude. Give up moral leverage over whites, refuse to shame them with America’s racist past, and the gratitude they show you will constitute a new form of black power. They will love you for the faith you show in them.

Well, that theory certainly didn’t last very long.

The McCain campaign produced one little tiny 32 second advertisement, making the at-this-point pretty obvious charge that Barack Obama is running for the presidency as a media-manufactured pop star celebrity and lacks substance, and Obama, stung for the first time by McCain, plays the race card.

It’s beyond pathetic, isn’t it? When it was politically advantageous Barack Obama was the post-racial candidate, but one effective opposition ad that hits home and he goes running for the shelter of his certified victim group membership immunity.

“F for Failure” coming to a town near you.

1:17 video

A past major democrat donor from Chicago tells Andrew Tobias in no uncertain terms why she’s not giving Barack Obama a plug nickel.

link

There is a pattern with this guy – he manipulates; the ends justify the means. He lacks character.

Getting not one bill passed in the first 6 years of his career in not inspiring. Having Emil Jones hand him the ball 26 times on the one-yard line in order to make Obama a United States Senator does not cut it either. What deals he made, he did to benefit no one but himself. He never worked long enough in either Senate to help the people who elected him. Andy, I could never imagine you taking credit for legislation someone else slaved over. Starting in his community organizing days he claimed sole responsibility for other people’s accomplishments all for the purpose to boosting his career.

In terms of the campaign itself, I had the opportunity to witness his methods up close. During the primaries I was in 6 states, 2 of which had caucuses; it was not clean. El Paso was a joke with the Obama campaign stealing the caucus packets, locking supporters out – Intimidation 101, 102 and 103. Fair elections do not seem to be a priority in my birth state. No other machine exists from the days of Boss Tweed, but Chicago’s. How many elected officials are in jail? They are the joke of the nation. It is called the Chicago machine for good reason.

It was clear that what I saw and experienced was not a fluke or isolated incidents, but coordinated, deliberate and arrogant. I got to see him and his organization for who he is and what it is – not inspiring, to say the least. Not something I would have, in business, endorsed in any way. …

Andy, I have consistently found you to be a compassionate person, but more importantly you have always put your money where your mouth is. Does it not bother you that a guy like Obama can serve a poor district and give away a paltry $1000 to charity? He only stepped up his giving when he decided to run for President and he knew his charitable
giving would be made public. How could anyone see that much misery and not try to personally do something about it?

Please, show me something this guy ever did that was not done in a calculated fashion to create and advance his own personal narrative? Something selfless, perhaps, just because it was the right thing to do?

Every person I have talked to who worked at the Law Review at Harvard with him, or in the later part of his career, said the same thing: he was arrogant and self-centered. One person laughed, saying Obama wanted to be King of the World, that he was always running for something, never staying in one place long enough to amass accomplishments or be held accountable. …

I am an issues person, not a cult of personality devotee. Substance matters. Barack is a politician, an inexperienced one at that, pretending he is different. I just see him as arrogant and power hungry.

Hat tip to Seneca the younger.

I had so many computer problems recently: dying server, installing programs on new PC, Photoshop hanging on OPEN (Solution: you just hit ESCAPE) that I didn’t have time to see this new anti-Obama celeb ad yesterday.

0:32 video

The left is angry at having the latest avatar of the great God Osiris compared to Paris Hilton, but I thought myself it was too short and not nearly pointed enough.

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This idiot is peddling a bunch of moonbat guano about how the McCain celeb ad is really a covert attack on miscegenation. Liberals love using racism as a gotcha! weapon so much that they readily lose all touch with reality in their eagerness to play the race card.

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Michael Shaw goes even crazier at Huffpo. He writes so badly that it isn’t easy to figure out what he’s raving about, but he seems to be suggesting that John McCain has incorporated subliminal images designed to brainwash Americans into assassinating Obama.

I used to think Huffington Post was a fairly responsible outlet for “Progressive” opinion.

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Can you believe they actually let these whackjobs vote?

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Carrie Budoff Brown sees the ad as part of a growing pattern of arrogance/vanity jokes at Obama’s expense.

Last week… the narrative of Obama as a president-in-waiting – and perhaps getting impatient in that waiting – began reverberating beyond the e-mail inboxes of Washington operatives and journalists.

Perhaps one of the clearest indications emerged Tuesday from the world of late-night comedy, when David Letterman offered his “Top Ten Signs Barack Obama is Overconfident.” The examples included Obama proposing to change the name of Oklahoma to “Oklobama,” and measuring his head for Mount Rushmore.

“When Letterman is doing ‘Top Ten’ lists about something, it has officially entered the public consciousness,” said Dan Schnur, a political analyst with the University of Southern California and the communications director in John McCain’s 2000 campaign. “And it usually stays there for a long, long time.”

Following a nine-day, eight-country tour that carried the ambition and stagecraft of a presidential state visit, Obama has found himself in an unusual position: the butt of jokes.

Jon Stewart teased that the presumptive Democratic nominee traveled to Israel to visit his birthplace at Bethlehem’s Manger Square. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd amplified the McCain campaign’s private nickname for Obama (“The One”).

And the snickers about Obama’s perceived smugness may have a very real political impact as McCain launched its most forceful effort yet to define him negatively. It released a TV ad Wednesday describing Obama as the “biggest celebrity in the world,” comparable to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, stars who are famous for attitude rather than accomplishments.

Paul Weyrich reacts to the liberal media’s treatment of Barack Obama as “designated President,” and notes that going over to Europe and playing president has not really done his poll numbers a lot of good.

Not yet elected president, hell, he hasn’t even been nominated yet. And since he lost the democrat party popular vote to Hillary, absent universal media support and some peculiar manuevers by that democrat rules committee, he wouldn’t even be being nominated.

It was an unusually warm January day in Washington as President-elect Barack Hussein Obama took the oath of office administered by longtime Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. Stevens already had administered the oath of office to Vice President-elect Evan Bayh, of Indiana, who had been picked by Obama because he was perceived to be a middle-of-the-road man. Recent reporting has revealed that Bayh shares most of Obama’s radical views on issues. The packed Capitol Plaza waited with eager anticipation as now President Obama was about to deliver a rhetorical masterpiece, for which he had become famous.

Have trouble recalling how Obama had bested Senator John Sidney McCain, III? Was it the Electoral College which elected Obama or the popular vote or both? No one seems to remember.

No one seems to remember because there was no election. It began with the presumptive nominee’s trip to the Middle East and Europe. The Obama campaign began referring to the candidate as if he already were President. That, while politically risky, is certainly understandable. What is not understandable is how many in the media went along with what the campaign fed them. They began to treat the Senator from Illinois as if he already had been elected President. These are media types who believe that perception is reality. If they can convince the electorate that Senator Obama already is President the election will become a mere formality. In fact, the election is a sort of tolerated nuisance in their eyes.

It might have worked but for the contempt the electorate has for the media. I saw at least half a dozen interviews on cables over the air networks. In every case voters said, “He is behaving as if he were already elected.” Most said, “That isn’t right.” What shocked the reporters, who were stuck hanging around with McCain as he campaigned in small-town America while their anchors reported live from Obama’s trip, was how the voters got it. A number identified themselves as Democrats. One even said he was an Obama supporter. The tracking polls confirmed what these voters told the reporters. The campaign believed this trip would give Obama a big bump, putting Senator Obama permanently ahead in what has been up to now a surprisingly tight race with Senator McCain. It didn’t turn out that way. In every tracking poll Senator Obama actually lost support. He had opened a six-point lead at the beginning of the trip. Depending on which tracking poll one prefers, Obama’s lead decreased to either four, three or two points. Individual states were even more dramatic. In no state did his support increase. In some states where he had gone ahead substantially his support either reversed the trend or is now behind. They include Colorado, Minnesota and Michigan, among others.

There are lessons here for both campaigns and the media. Campaigns must be respectful of the America voter. Campaigns which put their candidate ahead of the candidate’s actual position run the risk of appearing arrogant. It would take something cataclysmic for both Obama and McCain not to receive their party’s nomination. Yet the voters want to see that it really happens.

Richard Cohen, in the Washington Post

“Just tell me one thing Barack Obama has done that you admire,” I asked a prominent Democrat. He paused and then said that he admired Obama’s speech to the Democratic convention in 2004. I agreed. It was a hell of a speech, but it was just a speech.

Read the whole thing.

Barack Obama’s decision to cancel a scheduled visit to wounded US soldiers in a medical facility at Landstuhl, Germany because he could not be accompanied by press photographers provoked criticism from the McCain campaign, and the New York Times is on the job today to explain “it wasn’t really like that.”

It wasn’t the case, you see, that Barack Obama blew off wounded soldiers when he found he couldn’t exploit visiting them for personal political gain. No, no, no. He is so high-minded and idealistic a guy that he realized that

Even him going alone would likely be characterized by some as a political event,” Mr. Gibbs said in an interview on Monday, adding, “He decided not to put the troops in that position.”

So he gave up the visit in order to spare the troops.

These scruples didn’t stop him from posing for this 2:06 video

And he seems to have plenty to say about how he visited troops here.