SECOND EVENING POST:  AUGUST 3,  2008

Posted at 11:51 p.m. ET

THEY'RE CATCHING ON

I've written here before that some of the foreign reporters are more perceptive about Barack Obama than are their American counterparts.  But it was still startling to see an anti-Obama editorial in the safely liberal Toronto Globe & Mail.  Coming after some European and British writers expressed doubts about the sainted one during his foreign "blessings from me" tour, this reaffirms my point.  Maybe even The New York Times will notice.  Toronto speaks:

Having previously won praise for running a positive and optimistic campaign, Mr. Obama has now helped insert an ugly element into the U.S. presidential race.

At several recent campaign stops, Mr. Obama has all but accused Mr. McCain and his supporters of attempting to use his race against him. "Nobody thinks that Bush and McCain have a real answer to the challenges we face. So what they're going to try to do is make you scared of me," he said during one such speech on Wednesday. "You know, 'he's not patriotic enough, he's got a funny name,' you know, 'he doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.'"

Has McCain actually said that?  No, reports the Canadian paper.  There have been similar attacks, but...

none have come from the Republican candidate or those who work for him. Nor is there any cause to believe that Mr. McCain would even consider stooping so low. It was only last month that he went so far as to denounce a controversial cover of The New Yorker depicting Mr. Obama and his wife, even though allegations of racism against the magazine were wildly misplaced.

And...

In a campaign in which the potential impact of every word is carefully considered, he (Obama) was clearly attempting to rally some of his supporters by painting himself - and in turn other black Americans - as the victims of Mr. McCain's prejudice.

Mr. Obama should know better. His campaign has succeeded thus far because of a compelling message about uniting Americans in common purpose. But "playing the race card," as the McCain campaign accurately charged, only sows new divisions and accentuates old ones. And in the process, it unfairly besmirches the reputation of an opponent Mr. Obama has previously purported to respect.

If you've seen an editorial as sharp as that in an American paper, please alert me.  Wouldn't it be ironic if foreigners, who have claimed to love Obama, are the first to realize that the suit is neither half empty nor half full, but entirely empty?

August 3, 2008.      Permalink          

EVENING POST:  AUGUST 3,  2008

Posted at 11:30 p.m. ET

A POOR STUDENT

While driving to our destination earlier tonight I turned on John Batchelor, one of the best radio hosts on the air.  Unfortunately, he's only on radio in New York, Washington, and Los Angeles, but his show can be picked up over the internet on Sunday nights, 7-10 p.m. ET, by going to WABC radio on the internet.

John's guests were the historian Victor Davis Hanson and John Fund, of The Wall Street Journal.  They were talking about Obama's recent trip to Germany, and were giving him low grades.  Fund noted that he has relatives in Germany who expressed surprise that, in the middle of a campaign, a presidential candidate would come to Germany and make a speech that spoke to Europe in European, rather than American terms.  Ah, but Fund's relatives have never seen a presidential candidate who's running for president of the world.  America is small potatoes to a messiah.

Hanson, in what I thought was a very perceptive observation, declared Obama a poor student.  He's a poor student, Hanson said, because he doesn't learn.  He gets facts wrong.  In his mention of the Berlin airlift during his Berlin speech, Obama asserted that the world saved Berlin.  No, Berlin was saved by the U.S. Air Force, with an assist from the RAF.  But apparently Obama chokes on the idea of giving America credit for anything, especially the American military.

In his more candid moments, Obama comes off as a traditional leftist anti-American, a man who wants to "return" America to its "ideals."  But I don't recall the left ever expressing any approval of America at any time.  What ideals is he talking about?  This is a man who, standing in Berlin, could not develop the spine to give his own country credit for saving that city from the Russians.  He talks about ideals.

August 3,  2008.      Permalink          

EARLY AFTERNOON POST:  AUGUST 3,  2008

Posted at 1:41 p.m. ET

TRACKERS

Both trackers are out, and both - Rasmussen and Gallup - show Obama with a one-point lead.  Gallup had the race tied for the two previous days, so I guess this represents some slight gain for Obama, but, considering the margin of error and statistical noise, it actually represents nothing.  The race is basically a dead heat.

Given the fact that Obama normally polls better than he produces on election day, there can be no joy in Obamaland.  At the same time, as we noted earlier, Rasmussen points out that McCain hasn't actually led in two months.  He's shown in the last week what can be done when he comes alive, and he has to stay alive.  As Dick Morris has pointed out, August is a critical month.  McCain must put Obama on the defensive, and negate Obama's convention bounce before it happens.

This will be a complicated August because attention will be distracted by the China Olympics, August 8-24.  The Dem convention starts in Denver on the 25th. (They give all their Mao fans a day to get back.)  There are some hints that Obama will name his v.p. choice before the games, which will give him extra publicity.  That makes sense.  He doesn't want to compete with the games with his announcement, and announcing at the convention pushes the choice into the haze of all the convention news.  That could be a special problem if the convention is besieged by less-than-polite demonstrators.

But there's also a trap in a pre-games announcement.  The announcement is made, there's the usual hoopla, and then the choice, just starting his or her campaign, gets lost in the Olympic coverage. 

McCain's best strategy would be to wait for his convention, September 1-4, then announce a stunner.  But there are few stunners available.  McCain has the advantage of going second, and scheduling the GOP convention in early September might turn out to have been a good idea.  People will be getting back from the Labor Day weekend the first night of the convention.  Their attention can then focus.  McCain needs that convention bounce.

August 3, 2008.       Permalink            

SUNDAY:  AUGUST 3,  2008

Posted at 8:35 a.m. ET

McCAIN ON THE MOVE?

When baseball was still a game, and the Dodgers played in Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, the sportscaster Red Barber coined the phrase "FOB," full of Brooklyns, to describe a bases-loaded situation with Dodgers occupying first, second, and third.

Well, in the last few days we've seen FOM, for full of McCains.  There are stories everywhere about a McCain campaign that, two weeks ago, couldn't get enough ink to print a postage stamp.  Why?  Because the polls have moved.

It's still very early, but reporters have suddenly noticed that Saint Barack of Chicago (South Side parish), is vulnerable.  These erudite scholars have also noticed that it's the American voters, not the various herrs and fraus of the German government, who will decide our next president.  This has come as revelation itself, and the ink is flowing. 

Hallelujah!  He has made His presence known, and his name ain't Barack.

One report puts it this way: 

WASHINGTON (AFP) - John McCain is finally making noise in the White House race, after weeks of anemic photo ops, scattershot attacks and looking on as Democrat Barack Obama soaked up adulation and opinion poll leads.

The Republican stiffened his campaign with a negative new strategy, claimed Obama is playing the 'race card' against him, and mocked his Democratic foe as an empty celebrity and prone to a Messiah complex.

In the fiercest combat of the general election so far, McCain tasted successive victories last week in the battle for daily news coverage, the political trench warfare which adds up to define a campaign.

But then comes the obligatory warning.  This must be required by federal law, like the label on pillows, because you see it in every story:

But McCain's change of tack, which followed Republican whispering about his performance and Obama's return from a triumphant foreign tour, carries risks along with its promise of political gain...

..."Any time you engage in negative campaigning, you always run the risk of it backfiring on your own campaign," said Costas Panagopoulos, of Fordham University's Elections and Campaigns Management program.

"That said, people remember negative ads -- candidates use them because they are effective.."

Also, Obama is horrible on defense.  After all, why should a certified Angel have to defend himself?

McCain is betting that he can dim Obama's so far remarkably resilient star power -- and seems to be making preemptive bid to limit any 'bounce' his rival enjoys from his party convention in three weeks.

But one political giant -- Hillary Clinton -- has already tried such a strategy and failed, during the Democratic primary season when she branded Obama "a lot of talk, no action."

Wrong.  Check your facts, Mr. Journalist.  It's when she went on offense that she began to make gains.  But she'd already suffered too much damage to win.

McCain left no doubt about his tactics on Saturday.

"Senator Obama is an impressive orator, and it's a lucky thing for me that people aren't just choosing a motivational speaker," he said in a radio address.

"Washington is full of talented talkers and Senator Obama is one of the best to come along in quite a while -- unfortunately on issues big and small, what he says and what he does are often two different things."

Oh, unfair, unfair.  How dare he!

Each McCain attack was met with a quick, forcible response, with the ads branded "juvenile" and "sad."

Obama joined the fray himself Saturday saying that though he did not think McCain's campaign was racist, it was "cynical."

Yeah.  Take that, McCain.  Obama's defense has been anemic because there's not much to it.  It hasn't worked, even with The New York Times helping out by expressing shock that McCain would find anything wrong with The One.

David Plouffe, Obama's campaign manager, weighed in:

"He is increasingly going to take his campaign into the gutter -- I think John McCain has harmed himself in the last week, really eroding any capital he had built up in terms of the kind of politician he is."

When they start talking that way, you know they're bleeding, if only a little.  Attacks, if they are accurate and well-executed, are an important part of democratic politics.  A candidate has a right, and indeed an obligation, to point out what he thinks is wrong with his opponent.  This McCain is doing.  It's about time.

August 3, 2008.      Permalink          

THE FEAR

Another example of classic New York liberalism: The New York Post surveyed some of the Obama Flock (blessed be them) to ask how they'd react if...if...I cannot write the dread words:

As it turns out, there is a way to render the most vocal Obamamanic speechless: Ask if the possibility - however slight, however remote - of their candidate losing is something that may have ever, for the briefest moment, crossed their mind.

"I hadn't even thought about it," says Brooklynite Jeff Strabone, who has gone so far as to adopt Obama's middle name, Hussein, as his own. ("I thought, 'Let's make it an asset - like, "I am Spartacus!' "). Strabone was planning to keep the Hussein through election day, but if Obama loses, "I may have to keep it a little longer." Also, he would cry: "That's what I'll do. It would mean the country wants to go backwards, towards fear, anti-intellectualism. I don't know . . . I don't even want to think about it."

Please note:  A man who doesn't want to think about it denounces anti-intellectualism.  Ponder that.

"It's funny - I hadn't even thought about it once," says Jake Abraham, who has produced events for the Obama campaign. "It's totally possible - we're often in the situation where the Democrat loses. George Bush was a terrible, terrible president. But Karl Rove was very sly, and he put together a very mannered strategy that worked. There are plenty of uninformed voters out there, and all you have to do is scare them."

Ah, yes.  Anyone who opposes Obama must be uninformed and easily scared.  All you Urgent Agenda loyalists are undoubtedly reading this while trembling under your beds.  You must have those little laptops.

A liberal historian says:

"When you ask most Americans who the best American presidents were, they say, 'Washington, Lincoln, FDR' - and then they add Kennedy and Reagan," says presidential historian Robert Dallek. As with Obama, "those two gave the country hope and inspired so many people - JFK with the New Frontier and Reagan with Morning in America."

Strange.  I don't recall liberals saying that Reagan offered hope and inspiration...until now, two decades after his presidency. 

And among those given "hope" by Obama is apparently his wife, who says this is the first time she's ever been proud of her country, and tells us America is mean-spirited.  Boy, what hope.

Read the piece.  There are more chuckles.

August 3, 2008.      Permalink