Democrats have a record of insisting upon maximum electoral inclusivity. They want felons to vote. They don’t even want anyone to be inconvenienced or discountenanced by being required to produce valid identification.

If you happen to spoil your ballot, or accidentally vote for the wrong candidate, a national election should go on and on, they argued in 2000, and you should get to do it all over again, because the correct choice of each and every single voter must be recorded.

Suddenly though, we are now listening to a very different tune.

Democrat party voters in Florida and Michigan, we are told, should be completely disenfranchised and excluded from participation in deciding their party’s choice of nominee for the presidency, through no fault or mistake of their own. They didn’t commit any crime or mess up any ballot. It’s just because their state leadership moved the date of their state’s primary forward contrary to the wishes of the DNC.

In 2000, every hanging chad was sacred, and the nation’s political processes could remain paralyzed indefinitely, as week succeeded week, because the vote of every single Floridian had to be definitively counted. In 2008, that same Florida voter can go hang (like a chad). The Left means to crown Obama, and if the voters of Florida and Michigan happen to be in the way, that’s just too bad. A 48 state primary process will be fine.

Matthew Yglesias supplies a fine example of Phariseeism.

Harold Ickes explains to the Politico that the Clinton camp knows where it can get some reinforcements.

The campaign of Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) has begun urging party officials and news organizations to include the disputed Florida and Michigan delegations when figuring the number of delegates needed to win the nomination.

That unorthodox approach could put her in striking distance of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) over the next month.

Harold Ickes, Clinton’s chief delegate strategist, said in a telephone interview that the senator is likely to finish the primary and caucus season on June 3 “substantially less than 100 delegates behind” Obama’s total if those two states are included.

“We don’t believe that this party is going to go forward into a presidential race without seating both Florida and Michigan,” Ickes said.

But the Democratic National Committee had declared those delegates should not be counted as punishments to the states for moving their contests so soon in the process.

So Clinton’s argument depends on the actions of the party’s Rules and Bylaws Committee when it meets May 31 to consider pro-Clinton challenges that would seat those delegations.

Clinton’s new magic number to clinch the nomination is 2,209 delegates, compared to the 2,025 that would be needed without Florida and Michigan.

“The Obama people keep talking about 2,025, which implies they don’t intend to seat Florida and Michigan,” Ickes said. “We think that’s a mistake on the part of the party – it’s foolish.”

Maureen Dowd is shocked at what a cynical politician that once sweet young Hillary has become. How dare she stand in the Left’s way?

heaven help the Democrats as they try to shake off Hillary. On top of her inane vows to obliterate Iran, OPEC and the summer gas tax, she plans “a nuclear option” during her Shermanesque march to Denver. Tom Edsall reported on The Huffington Post that the Hillaryites will try, at a May 31 meeting of the Democratic Rules and Bylaws Committee, to renege on their word and get the Michigan and Florida delegations seated. Addressing supporters here, she urged the counting of the Florida and Michigan votes, noting “it would be a little strange to have a nominee chosen by 48 states.”

“It’s full speed onto the White House,” she said. …

It’s hard to believe that this Hillary is the same Wellesley girl who said she yearned for a more “ecstatic and penetrating mode of living.” What would that young Hillary — who volunteered on Gene McCarthy’s anti-war campaign; who cried the day Martin Luther King Jr. was killed; who referred to some of her “smorgasbord of personalities” in a 1967 letter to a friend as an “alienated academic,” and an “involved pseudo-hippie”; who once returned a bottle of perfume after feeling guilty about the poverty around her — think of this shape-shifting, cynical Hillary?

She’s so at odds with who she used to be, even in the Senate, that if she were to get elected, who would voters be electing?

Obama is like her idealistic, somewhat naïve self before the world launched 1,000 attacks against her, turning her into the hard-bitten, driven politician who has launched 1,000 attacks against Obama.

As she makes a last frenzied and likely futile attempt to crush the butterfly, it’s as though she’s crushing the remnants of her own girlish innocence.

Howie Carr identifies the message of the hour you’ll soon be reading in the MSM.

These next few days are going to be a terrible time for Hillary Clinton. The title of our next episode is, “Get Out Already, Hillary!” It becomes ever clearer just how much the mainstream media is in the satchel for Barack Obama. It’s not just Chris Matthews who gets a tingle up his leg when he hears Barack. They all swoon.

And now they are going to demand that Hillary quit. The din will be incessant. They want to get down to what they consider the real Lord’s work, bashing John McCain. The trust-funded Ivy Leaguers of the press corps want to make the Rev. John Hagee the same household word that Jeremiah Wright has become.

The Clintons know this. Why do you think Paul Begala sounded so bitter on CNN last night?

“We cannot win with eggheads and African-Americans,” he said. “That’s the Dukakis coalition.”

Time will tell if the democrat party’s Rube Goldberg Superdelegate system is really capable of functioning as a safety mechanism to prevent that party’s radical activist base from selecting yet another George McGovern-style leftwing candidate to lead them to electoral disaster.

Despite Obama’s victory in North Carolina (based on a little-reported 91% of the black vote), it is too soon to count Hillary out. Yesterday’s news of the Clinton Campaign identifying the elimination of OPEC as a policy goal constitutes the single best strategic insight of the 2008 campaign so far.

Obama has the media, the Kennedys, and the activist nutroots on his side, but the Clintons still have a loyalist group representing a strong percentage of their party’s most proficient professionals.

——————————————-
BREAKING NEWS

The Clinton Campaign canceled public appearances today, and is reportedly going into private conference with superdelegates to see if there remains any possibility of victory.

Rick Moran identifies the key factor behind Obama’s advantage:

Clinton’s major problem showed in Pennsylvania and especially in Indiana; she is being outspent by Obama everywhere. Turnout in rural areas was not quite what the Clinton camp was banking on while Obama’s voters showed up in record numbers. It could be that her campaign is now suffering a bottleneck in funds which is beginning to tell at the ballot box. And with hope for victory becoming ever fainter, there is a good chance that her ability to raise money in the amounts that would enable her to compete effectively with Obama may be at an end.

She can’t keep being outspent 3 or 4 to 1 in every state and get the blow out victories she absolutely needs to close the delegate gap with Obama. Instead, that gap widened last night to where it is now, almost 150 delegates and climbing, thanks to Obama’s continued success in wooing Superdelegates.

Is this the end of the line for Hillary Clinton? The consensus among the talking heads on cable appears to be coalescing around the idea that she should wind her campaign down and get out of Obama’s way.

——————————————-
THEY Begin To Decide

Ben Smith reports, but fails to recognize or understand, that Hillary Clinton has managed to identify the United States’ key foreign policy aim: the destruction of the OPEC oil cartel, which represents a monstrous and increasingly burdensome tax upon the economies of the West levied by a collection of backward dictatorships and parasitical Third World regimes. The incomprehensibly vast wealth transfers effectuated by this artificial manipulation of the pricing of a basic world commodity have not produced the enlightenment and content prosperity of its beneficiaries, but has instead emboldened them to promote religious intolerance and hostility toward the West, while enabling them to fund the arming and training of a new Order of Assassins, a series of militant bands of murderous fanatics bent on suicidal violence aimed at innocent victims in Middle Eastern countries and South East Asia as well as Europe and the United States.

Destroy OPEC, and you cut the Gordian Knot. You eliminate Terrorism at its source by removing its funding. You also simultaneously revitalize the economies of every country in the entire productive world by extracting a major parasite that has been feeding upon its vitals.

Clinton’s attacks on oil prices as artificially inflated, Enron-style, keep escalating, and today she appeared to threaten to break up the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.

“We’re going to go right at OPEC,” she said. “They can no longer be a cartel, a monopoly that get together once every couple of months in some conference room in some plush place in the world, they decide how much oil they’re going to produce and what price they’re going to put it at,” she told a crowd at a firehouse in Merrillville, IN.

“That’s not a market. That’s a monopoly,” she said, saying she’d use anti-trust law and the World Trade Organization to take on OPEC.

Clinton has cast herself as a warrior for working people against the oil industry and malicious “speculators,” and made that — along with her push for a gas tax holiday — central to her closing message in Indiana.

It’s a potent message, like the attack on “Wall Street money brokers,” with deep roots in American politics. It’s also very hard to figure out what exactly she means by the threat to break OPEC.

Kiss Obama goodbye, lefties. Hillary is going to run on this one, and he will be toast.

And John McCain had better move rapidly to adopt the same policy, or he could also be in deep trouble.

Andrew Sullivan’s brain seems to have turned still more completely into mush, as he quotes approvingly this message from a younger reader on the Left.

Your old farts really do miss the point completely, don’t they? These younger people were convinced that political involvement was useless because the system was so broken. They came of age anywhere from the second Clinton term (Lewinsky) through the disaster of the Bush years. They have no reason to believe that politics can work, or that it is possible to effect any large scale change, so they work locally or just opt out.

This is what Obama has tapped into. The reason all those thousands of young Dems registered for the first time and voted in a primary was because he made them believe honorable politics was possible. And if someone like Obama gets chewed up by the system because the forces arrayed against him are too strong — just look at the sworn enemies who are teaming up to bring him down, united by nothing more than a vested interest in the status quo — then they will conclude that the system is as broken as they thought it was.

The mistake is reading this as an Obama personality cult, in which case “grow up” would be appropriate. But the Obamaniacs I meet are nothing like that…

they don’t sing his praises, they sing their own. They are intoxicated by the idea of a politics where things they thought were not possible become possible, and people talk to each other like adults. They don’t think he’s going to fix things, they think they are.

What the old farts might want to consider is that these young people who have no particular vested interest in the current system might be seeing the rot much more clearly than the fogeys who have been entangled in it for decades. And the mature folk might want to accept that the burden of proof is on them to show why such a viscerally disgusting political game is worth playing.

Opting out of that is not immaturity, it’s intelligence.

Let’s see. These kiddies figured that if they registered to vote and campaigned for a leftist candidate, the Archangel Gabriel would show up and blow his horn, human nature would totally and completely change, the two party system and all opposition to immediate Socialism would vanish, and they would be able to do exactly as they pleased. After all, they deserve nothing less, being finer and better people and more sensitive and intelligent human beings than any other group of people or any generation which has ever lived. And if they don’t get the total and complete political gratification they are entitled to (on the basis of their youth and overall marvelousness) in this their first election, well! that will certainly prove that the American system is fatally broken and irredeemably corrupt, and they should simply opt out.

I certainly agree with the last part, as I don’t think young people so unsophisticated and self-infatuated have much of anything useful to contribute to the American political dialogue anyway.

Baldilocks, unlike myself, is religious, and has produced an impressive rant from her own genuinely Christian perspective.

Guys like Jeremiah Wright care about self-centric totems of race, culture and vengeance more than they care about leading their flocks down the straight and narrow path. They need these totems to fill the void of self-doubt and that need is filled by navel-gazing religions like Black Liberation Theology and one of its parents, the Nation of Islam. Yes, BLT is a progeny of the NOI, Christianity and Marxism—a bastard child, to be sure. It’s an I-deology all right and Wright has sacrificed the eternal souls of those who believe his lies and are grateful for his good works. He has sacrificed these upon the altar of race and culture. (My own pastor says that God has special plans for shepherds—pastors—who mislead their flocks.)

Wright’s megalomania is such that he couldn’t even bring himself to hold his peace for Obama’s sake—that’s one of problems inherent in allying oneself with narcissists—and even had the nerve to be guarded by the Fruit of Islam, Daddy’s the Nation of Islam’s security force.

The most infuriating thing about Wright is his attempt to cover himself using other black people, black Christians, by saying that attacks on him weren’t really about him but about the ‘black church.’ And then he wants to fling around epithets like “Uncle Tom.”

Let’s be clear. Neither blackness, African, American or European origin, American nationality or American allegiance need a defense because such a defense would inherently be just as erroneously-focused as Jeremiah Wright’s jeremiad. Ethnic origins aren’t things to be defended, denigrated or repudiated or sworn allegiance to–my own heritage stems from this continent and two other continents–these things simply are; these facts are existential. Nationality is special: it’s existential but can also be voluntarily retained or released. And allegiance to any entity is entirely voluntary, but no one has to prove his/her allegiance to this country as part and parcel of a repudiation of an ethnicity or heritage. Those days went out with FDR.

Here’s what I do come to defend, to stand in defense of: Christianity and Christians who are black. Jeremiah Wright defames both and speaks for neither and little obscure me will not let him use either as fig leaf. Yes, our ancestors in this country and our kinsmen across the water fought to be just as Christian as other Christians—as Christian as our brothers who are white. And many of the latter stood for us and side-by-side with us—not because of us primarily but because of the One Who is Primary. Has that particular battle been won? I say yes, though the war continues. But Wright not only continues to fight the battle, he willfully misunderstands the nature of the War and identity of the Enemy. And by doing that, he becomes the tool of the Enemy. That’s his choice, but not mine and not that of those who focus on the Redemption offered by Christ instead of getting upon the Cross themselves.

To quote myself, there is no “black church.” There is only the Church.

Word to Obama: thanks a lot, “brotha.” Nice pastor you have there.

Noam Scheiber, in New Republic, delves into the question of the hour.

The question is worth revisiting now that his ex-pastor is threatening his entire campaign.

I’ve heard two basic theories since the Wright tapes first surfaced in March. The first is cynical: Obama was a black politician in Chicago with an exotic background and intimidating credentials. He needed a home in a black church to gain credibility with his less educated, less affluent, more parochial-minded constituents. Trinity offered him the requisite cred.

The second, not entirely unrelated, theory is psychoanalytical: Obama, as the product of a racially-mixed marriage, in which the black father was almost entirely absent, had spent his whole life groping for an authentic identity. Wright offered Obama both the father and the identity he never had.

The problem with both theories is that they don’t answer the question of why this particular church, this particular pastor. Yes, Wright was a prominent figure with a large congregation. But surely there were other pastors and churches that fit that profile. And, in retrospect, probably distinctly less controversial ones.

Which is where this fascinating passage from David Mendell’s Obama biography comes in:

Wright earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in sacred music from Howard University and initially pursued a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago Divinity School before interrupting his studies to minister full-time. His intellectualism and black militancy put him at odds with some Baptist ministers around Chicago, with whom he often sparred publicly, and he finally accepted a position at Trinity. …

Wright remains a maverick among Chicago’s vast assortment of black preachers. He will question Scripture when he feels it forsakes common sense; he is an ardent foe of mandatory school prayer; and he is a staunch advocate for homosexual rights, which is almost unheard-of among African-American ministers. Gay and lesbian couples, with hands clasped, can be spotted in Trinity’s pews each Sunday. Even if some blacks consider Wright’s church serving only the bourgeois set, his ministry attracts a broad cross section of Chicago’s black community. Obama first noticed the church because Wright had placed a “Free Africa” sign out front to protest continuing apartheid. The liberal, Columbia-educated Obama was attracted to Wright’s cerebral and inclusive nature, as opposed to the more socially conservative and less educated ministers around Chicago. Wright developed into a counselor and mentor to Obama as Obama sought to understand the power of Christianity in the lives of black Americans, and as he grappled with the complex vagaries of Chicago’s black political scene. “Trying to hold a conversation with a guy like Barack, and him trying to hold a conversation with some ministers, it’s like you are dating someone and she wants to talk to you about Rosie and what she saw on Oprah, and that’s it,” Wright explained. “But here I was, able to stay with him lockstep as we moved from topic to topic. . . . He felt comfortable asking me questions that were postmodern, post-Enlightenment and that college-educated and graduate school-trained people wrestle with when it comes to the faith. We talked about race and politics. I was not threatened by those questions.” …

But more than that, Trinity’s less doctrinal approach to the Bible intrigued and attracted Obama. “Faith to him is how he sees the human condition,” Wright said. “Faith to him is not . . . litmus test, mouth-spouting, quoting Scripture. It’s what you do with your life, how you live your life. That’s far more important than beating someone over the head with Scripture that says women shouldn’t wear pants or if you drink, you’re going to hell. That’s just not who Barack is.”

So, if you buy Wright’s account–and it rings pretty true to me–it was his intellectualism and social progressivism that won Obama over. Certainly it’s hard to imagine that someone like Obama, who came from a progressive, secular background, would have felt genuinely comfortable in a socially conservative, anti-intellectual church. The problem for Obama is that the flip-side of these virtues was a minister with a radical worldview and a penchant for advertising it loudly.

Which, put another way, means that Obama’s decision to join Trinity was probably the opposite of cynical. Trinity was the place where, despite the potential pitfalls–and he must have noticed them early on–Obama felt most true to himself.

Iowahawk imagines what Barack Obama’s advice column for the lovelorn might look like.

Sample inquiries:

Dear Barry,

I’ve been married to the same wonderful man — Let’s call him “Jeremiah” — for 20 years. He’s a great provider and we live in a beautiful home. He dotes on me and treats me like a queen; even after twenty years he still brings me little gifts and opens doors for me. Best yet, our sex life is fantastic! Jeremiah enjoys spicing things up with role-play, such as “Adolf and Eva,” and we host weekly swinger get-togethers for like-minded couples. I know it probably must sound kind of kinky, but trust me – it keeps things interesting in “the boudoir.”

That’s where the trouble comes in. Lately it’s been hard for Jeremiah to step out of his bedroom character, even when we have company over. For example, the other night I was hosting bunco night for the neighborhood girls and Jeremiah came goose-stepping into the rec room in his black leather swastika thong and riding crop, screaming “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer!!”

Frankly, it was somewhat embarrassing. I’ve asked Jeremiah to “tone it down” and save the Nuremberg speeches for the privacy of swinger’s night, but he refuses. Also, I think he may be clinically insane. I’m worried that if word gets out it may hurt our chances of getting membership in the country club. What should I do?

Confused in Hyde Park

———————————————
Dear Barry,

I am a graduate student at a large Midwestern university. Last semester I was seduced by an older female professor and we have been having a secret affair ever since. I know this is probably a “no-no,” but despite our age gap we share many common ideas and values, and she has been very helpful in lining up grants and scholarships for me. The trouble is I recently discovered that she is also a fugitive bomb maker from a radical neo-Maoist terrorist splinter cell affiliated with the Manson family. My conscience tells me I ought to break things off, but I’m worried how it might affect my GPA. Please help!

Torn in Evanston

———————————————

Dear Barry:

As a widow with three beautiful teenage daughters, life can sometimes be a lonely struggle. Luckily my friends recently set me up on a blind date with a Syrian immigrant gentleman whom I will call “Tony.” Although Tony is not particularly handsome, and is living in the U.S. illegally, and is facing 36 federal indictments, and has terrible body odor, he has been very kind and generous to me and my girls.

Lately, I think our relationship has gone to the next level. Yesterday Tony offered to buy a beautiful spacious $1 million house for us. I told him I was flattered but I just couldn’t accept a gift like that from someone I had only known a few weeks. He told me not to consider it a gift, but a loan that I could pay back in small installments, such as having my girls dance at a local club he owns. Not only would I be getting back a return for all those expensive after-school ballet lessons, Tony says the girls will get to meet many important businessmen from Syria, Iran, Cicero, etc.

My question — do you think this might be Tony’s prelude to a proposal?

Curious in Chicago

Read the whole thing.

Bob Dylan parody titled Obama Pastorale

6:38 video

Via Lisa Schiffren and Ann Althouse.

Not even the Lithuanian ones who went to Yale.

Mary Grabar answers him back on behalf of Polacks everywhere.

We know who you’re talking about, Barack Obama, when you talk about Pennsylvania and the Midwest, about small towns where the jobs have left. We know who you’re talking about when you talk about those who “get bitter” and “cling to guns or religion.”

You’re talking about “those people.”

You’re talking about white people who have neither the family connections nor the racial credentials to gain entrance to the world that you inhabit. Many of the people you’re talking about are those whose parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe who came to these places to work in steel mills, coal mines, and factories. We know the code words.

You’re talking about people whose culture is little known. We have been pretty quiet. We never tried to impose our culture on everyone. We never insisted on putting pictures of ourselves in our native dress into schoolbooks or mandating that our stories and songs be part of the curriculums.

We tried to maintain our culture without government aid, by forming our own churches and groups, and building Polish, Ukrainian, and Slovenian halls.

We never wore buttons declaring “Slav Power” or grouped together for purposes of intimidation or violence.

The power we asked for was the power of the paycheck which we earned in factories, steel mills, coal mines, or by cleaning houses. Yet, we were taken aside and told that because of affirmative action it was no use trying to advance off the assembly line; we were told in “diversity workshops” that people of color had to be promoted over more qualified white people. …

We paid cash for our houses and kept impeccable yards, yet saw the value of our homes plummet after marauding hoodlums came into our neighborhoods in riots that were celebrated by the intelligentsia in Manhattan penthouses, who saw such violence as justified expressions of outrage over past discrimination.

We went to public schools in those same neighborhoods only to be accosted for our skin color and the presumed “privilege” that teachers said we had. Rather than teach us what was good and beautiful about Western Civilization and the country to which our parents had fled, teachers gave us Marxist nonsense, if they bothered to teach at all. Our schoolmates saw the evening news, mimicked their elders by wearing “Black Power” buttons and felt justified in roughing the white kid who didn’t seem tough. Because we were “privileged”—despite washing our fathers’ sooty work clothes while our mothers went off to clean offices and houses in the suburbs—we were not eligible for scholarships, not even to the Catholic schools. Teachers never cut us any slack. Guidance counselors told us to be secretaries or work in the factory, despite our volunteering and demonstration of academic abilities. Our brothers, cousins, and uncles went off to fight in Vietnam, while those from your class took up arms against their campus administrators.

True, we had our problems, as all people do, with such things as alcoholism and family violence, but we handled those ourselves, and never blamed “society” or a history of oppression. Still, many of us did carry legacies from the old country, of hunger and persecution, of watching family members and villagers murdered by atheistic regimes. So we were grateful for the opportunity to work and buy our own little patches of the American Dream.

We were happy to use a welding torch, shovel, or broom to get them. We didn’t insist that we should all get college degrees. We didn’t have our documents translated for us or get bilingual instruction. If we didn’t know English we made sure our children did and we relied on them.

Your white friends in San Francisco, Barack, probably had cleaning women like my mother (and me when I accompanied her and then had my own cleaning jobs from age 12). As white people from a certain class and with certain connections, your donors knew that their futures would be secure because of their inheritances and the connections they could make in the media, politics, and business. In fact, it would benefit them in the world of “radical chic” to hang around those like you and support your policies. (Great opportunity to be photographed next to a black person!)

Your black friends there, like your wife, see no end to the amount that this country owes them because of what happened to their ancestors. It makes no difference that many of the whites in previous generations also had experienced persecution and hunger and worked in dangerous, dirty, and degrading jobs. Or that blacks and Native Americans were among the slave owners.

In fact, you and those wealthy donors sneer at white people who have had to do manual labor and who have paid for tuition at community colleges with the money earned that way, while our classmates received special scholarships and government grants—from our taxes.

You sneer at those like us who put our faith in God and not in those like you who would presume to know what’s good for us and tell us what to do with our money and our children, and leave us with no ability to defend ourselves.

Well, Barack, coming from your Ivy League world, you would not know much about us. You would not have learned that because we come from people who, rather than letting their communist benefactors redistribute the food, burned the crops in their little fields before they were forcibly “collectivized.” In Slovenia, they fought Tito’s Partisans from the woods and held mass at night when the Communists banned church services. They remember what it’s like to be hungry, ill, and living in little more than huts, while Marshall Tito and his communist cronies lived in villas. Now you live in a Chicago mansion and sneer at those like us who simply want to keep and defend our little three-bedroom ranches. You don’t know what it’s like to have family members die for the right to attend mass.

I know your liberal cronies, Barack; they make me check off my skin color on job applications and ask me during job interviews of how I teach multiculturalism, yet don’t know where Slovenia is on the world map. They couldn’t care less about my culture, nor about Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, or Lithuanian culture. Your supporters often feel free to mock my Slovenian heritage in letters and comments on the Internet when they disagree with me. I guess it’s like being called a “dumb Polack”—something that has never gained quite the opprobrium of other ethnic epithets.

See, Barack, we know the system: Some are more “equal” than others.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Steve Bodio.

Karl Rove applies a professional’s analysis to the democrat nomination fight.

Mrs. Clinton started as a deeply flawed candidate: the palpable and unpleasant sense of entitlement, the absence of a clear and optimistic message, the grating personality impatient to be done with the little people and overly eager for a return to power, real power, the phoniness and the exaggerations. These problems have not diminished over the long months of the contest. They have grown. She started out with the highest negatives of any major candidate in an open race for the presidency and things have only gotten worse.

And what of the reborn Adlai Stevenson? Mr. Obama is befuddled and angry about the national reaction to what are clearly accepted, even commonplace truths in San Francisco and Hyde Park. How could anyone take offense at the observation that people in small-town and rural American are “bitter” and therefore “cling” to their guns and their faith, as well as their xenophobia? Why would anyone raise questions about a public figure who, for only 20 years, attended a church and developed a close personal relationship with its preacher who says AIDS was created by our government as a genocidal tool to be used against people of color, who declared America’s chickens came home to roost on 9/11, and wants God to damn America? Mr. Obama has a weakness among blue-collar working class voters for a reason.

His inspiring rhetoric is a potent tool for energizing college students and previously uninvolved African-American voters. But his appeals are based on two aspirational pledges he is increasingly less credible in making.

Mr. Obama’s call for postpartisanship looks unconvincing, when he is unable to point to a single important instance in his Senate career when he demonstrated bipartisanship. And his repeated calls to remember Dr. Martin Luther King’s “fierce urgency of now” in tackling big issues falls flat as voters discover that he has not provided leadership on any major legislative battle.

Mr. Obama has not been a leader on big causes in Congress. He has been manifestly unwilling to expend his political capital on urgent issues. He has been only an observer, watching the action from a distance, thinking wry and sardonic and cynical thoughts to himself about his colleagues, mildly amused at their to-ing and fro-ing. He has held his energy and talent in reserve for the more important task of advancing his own political career, which means running for president.

But something happened along the way. Voters saw in the Philadelphia debate the responses of a vitamin-deficient Stevenson act-a-like. And in the closing days of the Pennsylvania primary, they saw him alternate between whining about his treatment by Mrs. Clinton and the press, and attacking Sen. John McCain by exaggerating and twisting his words. No one likes a whiner, and his old-style attacks undermine his appeals for postpartisanship.

Read the whole thing.

Dan Collins has got Obama pegged:

Karl Rove reflects on Obama and fleshes out the picture with commentary that seems similar to what I was saying yesterday about Think Progress. In his meta-commentary, Ed Morrissey calls him the Jon Stewart candidate:

Unfortunately for Obama and the Democrats who have carried him so close to the finish line, that “fierce urgency of now” is nothing more than a soundbite for a legislator who doesn’t legislate, an agent of change who hasn’t changes anything, and the beacon of hope who hasn’t felt an urgency to take any action in the “now” for the past three years. He’s been eating his waffle and hanging out with people who don’t like America or Americans much. That qualifies him to work the next Daily Show spin-off, not run the nation.

In my view, “the fierce urgency of now” could possibly pertain to the Waffle Imperative or the Beer Relief Imperative. But most of all, considering his refusal to debate any more (he’s already answered, like, eight questions), he has become the Bartleby candidate.