Who Wants to Lose Worse?

Earlier in the election cycle, it seemed as if the Republican Party was insistent upon losing this election. Conservative pundits, the Party establishment and even the candidates themselves seemed to trying to throw the race to the Democrats.

The talkers trashed a great up and coming conservative candidate in Mike Huckabee, who came in second despite them. The establishment backed candidates that no one really wanted, like Giuliani and Romney. The stalwart, old-party candidates, Thompson and McCain, ran campaigns that drifted and spun wildly.

In the end, backed by reluctant conservatives, and a kinda-enthusiastic establishment, McCain became the candidate by default. It seemed that the GOP was purposely choosing the least electable candidate to be our Party's nominee. I thought the Republicans were trying to lose, and doing a fine job of handing the Democrats an easy win.

Until now....

Not to be outdone by the GOP's dismal and frantic nomination process, the Democrats are determined to give the Republicans a run for their money. At losing, that is. Now that the field has been winnowed down to just two, Obama and Hillary are trying their best to destroy any chances of a Democrat victory. To this conservative, it's almost laughable. Almost.

Obama, once the "race-transcendent" candidate, has become a stammering apologist for the hate-America wing of the black political movement. He's not defending what they believe, because he can't believe it and win. But he's not denouncing them, because he can't denounce himself and his own constitutency and win. So, Obama expects us to believe that he listened to his preacher just enough to be a Chrisian, just like us...but that he ignored his preacher so much that he didn't know (gasp) that his preacher was a raving lunatic who hated America! It's all the sound bite's fault anyway.

In all fairness, nearly anyone can have a sound bite lifted out of context. But this is more than the press playing sound-bitus with an unpopular man. What kind of preacher wants God to damn America? What kind of preacher uses racial slurs, even to make a point? What kind of people listen to this stuff? What kind of people believe it?

Turning to Hillary, evidently she was not able to stand the thought that Obama might help the Democrats lose more than she would. She just had to join the fray. For reasons completely unknown to any sane person, she began to concoct war stories. Claiming to have come under sniper fire may sound brave, but it stretches the imagination. Especially to think that Hillary told us this knowing that nearly every moment of her public life is on video tape. What's next, is she going to claim to have invented the Internet? Perhaps, it wasn't Neil Armstrong taking one giant leap for mankind, after all.

So, the Democrats continue to kill the win while pursuing it. My prediction is that the Democrat establishment will let the two fight it out, even up until the convention. That same establishment will then order them onto the ticket together, to try and unify the party. Watch out, because Obama will win, and Hillary will be forced to the VP spot. She'll be madder than a wet hen because of it. Yet, her hunger for power will force her to smile and campaign madly.


In fact, the "Dream Ticket" will not be Barack and Hillary. It will be Barack, Hillary and the side show formerly known as Bill Clinton. They will gang up on McCain with all the pent up fury of a plugged volcano, finally spewing. It will be worse than scorched-earth against McCain. It will be nuclear.

To beat this, McCain desperately needs to be likable. That's about as likely as Bill Clinton being invisible. A likable Vice Presidential candidate would help McCain, but it would almost take Ronald Reagan himself to bring charm and warm fuzzies into the McCain camp. In the twenty or so names that have been mentioned, only two or three even remotely have what McCain needs. The Veepstakes are the only unknown on the GOP side of the equation, and they need to be more than just substantive. For McCain to compete, they need to be brilliant, and brilliance is in short supply this season in both parties.

In the end, this election will not be about who won. It will be about who insisted upon loosing. I don't see anyone winning right now.

Obama's Achilles Heel

Obama has a typical politician's problem, one especially prevalent in those who come from the legislature and try to go to the executive. That problem is the fact that he has to be sufficiently appealing to his base constituency to be elected to the legislature while he's running for the legislature. This leads him to do the traditional "things" that a legislator from his district or section of the country does. Then, when he tries to appeal to a national base, he finds that the local positions and rhetoric which once got him elected have now come back to haunt him.

In Obama's case, his was a Harvard-Princeton black family, and he ran for legislature among people who didn't relate to such a privileged upbringing. To combat that potential vote-killer, he chose to adopt the angry rhetoric of some people in the black community. Hence, he takes a pilgrimage to a known black terrorist in his district. He attends Jeremiah Wright's church. He chooses to be around the angry blacks; people more in the line of Malcom X than Martin Luther King, Jr. For many years, Obamba has been exceedingly comfortable in the more militant half of the black political scene.

Now, he's running on a broader stage, where not only does most of his audience not share his angry black views; they don't understand them. They feel threatened by them. They are aghast when Obama's preacher spews what is basically nonsense about whites and the government. They don't relate to the anger coming from the pulpit, and are tempted to respond in kind. There does not seem to be much room on the national stage for this militant black political view, simply because it is so foreign to most Americans.

So Obama finds himself in a most unenviable place. He must appeal to the national base, yet he must not disavow his home-town crowd. Unfortunately for Obama, that home-town crowd simply is not representative of most Americans. Unless he is more successful at distancing himself from them, he will not succeed. His past success at being comfortable among militant blacks may undo his very real chance of success on the national stage. Obama may be his own Achilles heel.