Apparently, the Obama birth certificate published on Daily Kos, later demonstrated to be a forgery was the result of an effort to avoid embarrassing discussion the real document bearing the candidate’s adopted name of Barry Soetero, and consequent issues connected with his dual citizenships.

Apparently, having a Kenyan birth father automatically makes Mr. Soetero a citizen of Kenya, and being adopted by an Indonesian father makes him an Indonesian citizen, too. Triune citizenship is bound to provoke campaign discussion. John McCain isn’t going to say: “Do you really want to elect a Kenyan and/or an Indonesian President of the United States?” but plenty of other people will.

Obama’s real Indonesian surname and dual citizenship is an even bigger problem, because it provokes further discussion of, and investigation into, his childhood personal ties to Islam.

I don’t think changing one’s name or possessing (even more than one form of) dual citizenship necessarily dooms a presidential candidacy in this day and age, but getting caught prevaricating never does any presidential candidate a bit of good.

Larry Johnson and Texas Darlin are gleefully dishing up the dirt about all this.

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The top conservative blogs are today starting to catch up with this story.

Gateway Pundit has learned of the Kenyan citizenship.

A candidate with his own presidential seal is prone to decide he also needs his own personal salute.

And, sure enough, US News & World Report recently found, Barack Obama’s gotten himself one of those, too.

But, maybe, just maybe, Obama needs to re-think these little personal touches. They provoke mockery, and worse, they prompt cynical people, like Gateway Pundit, to investigate possible sources of plagiarism.

With the media passionately on his side, the lame duck Bush Administration about as popular as the proverbial skunk at a picnic, and all signs promising a Battle of the Little Big Horn experience for the GOP in November, Barack Obama ought to be holding a commanding lead in the polls, but recent numbers indicate a dead heat.

Uh oh! The topic du jour among the chattering classes is just how fed up with listening to the media’s harp-accompanied chorus of hallelujahs for Barack Obama Americans have become.

Not a good sign, is it?

As the democrat convention nears, we begin to hear faintly, but growing gradually louder, the theme from Jaws.

Walter Shapiro, in Salon:

The nonpartisan Pew Research Center for the People & the Press diagnosed a new malady Wednesday: “Obama Fatigue.” That was the headline on a national survey conducted late last week that discovered that 48 percent of all voters and, tellingly, 51 percent of independents feel they have been “hearing too much” about Barack Obama. In contrast, only 10 percent of voters say they have been “hearing too little” about the de facto Democratic nominee.

“I was stunned by the numbers, since I didn’t expect that we’d get that kind of gap,” Andrew Kohut, the director of the Pew Research Center, said in an interview. Kohut, a respected pollster who rarely traffics in hyperbole, added, “I would have taken it far less seriously if we didn’t get the exact opposite result with the McCain question.” More voters (38 percent) complain that they have been hearing “too little” about John McCain than “too much” (26 percent).

This poll question, which has never before been asked about presidential candidates, is more intriguing than definitive.

As Obama sinks in the polls, Dennis Keohane wonders if it’s possible that democrats might still change their mind about nominating him.

Will Hillary outsmart Obama and take the nomination at the last minute?

Many of us familiar with Hillary Clinton’s approach to achieving her goals refused to believe that she ever gave up all hope of winning the nomination and the presidency. Her words and actions on the subject of the convention itself always left the door open for a return, should Obama falter or suffer some calamity.

Her artful evasions were enough to lull journalists and (more importantly) Obama and his supporters into the presumption of inevitability. No further rumblings of a mass protest in Denver should the first black candidate be denied his rightful due were heard. After all, he received enough publicly expressed support from super delegates to put him over the top. And he won the popular vote in the primaries, we were assured, lending legitimacy to the super delegates who voiced their support.

Everyone presumed the presumptive nominee was a lock.

Now there are a few signs that Hillary may be making her move. …

ABC news reported yesterday that Hillary Clinton does not rule out putting her name in nomination, contradicting earlier press reports.

Many people, including no doubt a goodly number of nervous Democrat super delegates, are asking themselves the David Brooks’ question about Obama’s standing in the polls: “Where’s the landslide?” After evaluating him for several months, voters in the middle still aren’t ready to embrace him.

National polls show not only a tightening of the Obama-McCain race to a statistical dead heat but momentum toward a McCain lead, something inconceivable only weeks ago. The specter of an Obama collapse has to haunt more than a few super delegates.

Buyer’s remorse seemed evident and growing among many Democrats toward the end of their primary season when Obama lost again and again to Clinton, even as the delegate math was by then stacked in his favor. That remorse was put on hold (but apparently not resolved) by Obama’s seeming to secure the nomination and the subsequent popular boost he enjoyed at first. But lately the candidate with a difference has had a hard time living up to his promise to be a new kind of politician.

According to RealClearPolitics, Obama has 1766.5 pledged delegates, 352 short of the 2118 needed to secure the nomination. He also has 463 super delegates, which puts him over the top — if they hold. If a combination of Clinton campaigning and nervousness can cause a hundred and twenty or so super delegates to sit out the first ballot, Obama does not get the nomination on the first ballot and perhaps not at all. After that first vote a great many pledged delegates and all the super delegates are free to vote as they choose.

He has a good point.

If you keep an eye on Larry Johnson’s No Quarter, you can see that there are plenty of irredentist Hillary supporters out there in the ranks of the democratic left.

If you’re not enthusiastically supporting Barack Obama, you may be a racist.

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.

Slate’s Timothy Noah tries for a new Olympic record in politically correct racial hermeutics by glaring reproachfully at Amy Chozick for joking in the Wall Street Journal about the possibility of Barack Obama’s svelteness constituting an electoral disadvantage in a country containing so many gravitationally-challenged Americans. According to Noah, any discussion of Obama’s “skinniness” and its impact on the typical American voter can’t avoid being interpreted as a coded discussion of race.

There’s an old joke which goes:

A man goes to a psychiatrist and says, “Doc I got a real problem, I can’t stop thinking about sex.”
The psychiatrist says, “Well let’s see what we can find out”, and pulls out his ink blots. “What is this a picture of?” he asks.
The man turns the picture upside down then turns it around and states, “That’s a man and a woman on a bed making love.”

The psychiatrist says, “Very interesting,” and shows the next picture. “And what is this a picture of?”
The man looks and turns it in different directions and says, “That’s a man and a woman on a bed making love.”

The psychiatrist tries again with the third ink blot, and asks the same question, “What is this a picture of?”
The patient again turns it in all directions and replies, “That’s a man and a woman on a bed making love.”

The psychiatrist states, “Well, yes, you do seem to be obsessed with sex.”
“Me!?” demands the patient. “You’re the one who keeps showing me the dirty pictures!”

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.