SECOND EVENING UPDATE:  JULY 15,  2008

Posted at 10:50 p.m. ET

OBAMA DILEMMA

Jake Tapper of ABC News hits it squarely on the head:  Barack Obama, probably much to his surprise, has an Iraq problem, as Senator McCain is pleased to point out:

"Senator Obama is departing soon on a trip abroad that will include a fact-finding mission to Iraq and Afghanistan," McCain said today at a town hall meeting in Albuquerque, "And I note that he is speaking today about his plans for Iraq and Afghanistan before he has even left, before he has talked to General Petraeus, before he has seen the progress in Iraq, and before he has set foot in Afghanistan for the first time. In my experience, fact-finding missions usually work best the other way around: first you assess the facts on the ground, then you present a new strategy."

Another conundrum for Obama: the surge of US troops in Iraq having created a safer and more secure Baghdad, McCain can now (perhaps for the first time) point to an aspect of the war where he is able to argue that his judgment was superior to Obama's.

Obama seemed today a bit on the defensive on Iraq, as evidenced by edits Obama's campaign staff made to language on his campaign website decrying the surge as a failure, as well as a speech Obama delivered today in which he explained why the surge's success doesn't change his view of needing to withdraw U.S. forces in that country.

And...

What Obama did not mention today was that the surge had succeeded in ways he did not think it would.

After President Bush discussed the surge in a speech in January 2007, Obama said on CNN that he "did not see anything in the speech or anything in the run-up to the speech that provides evidence that an additional 15,000 to 20,000 more U.S. troops is going to make a significant dent in the sectarian violence that's taking place there."

And...

Over the weekend, as first reported by the New York Daily News, the Obama campaign website changed language from declaring "the surge is not working" to that which instead states: "despite the improved security situation, the Iraqi government has not stepped forward to lead the Iraqi people and to reach the genuine political accommodation that was the stated purpose of the surge."

An older Obama campaign "fact sheet" from Fall 2007 states more unequivocally that "THE SURGE IS NOT WORKING" since "the Iraqi government has not stepped up." Obama also maintained that "reduced violence in Anbar Province is the result of cooperation between American forces and Sunni tribes, which started more than 18 months ago, long before the surge.

And...

Obama's only mention of Anbar today was to say that the future that "both America and Iraq will be more secure when the terrorist in Anbar is taken out by the Iraqi Army, and the criminal in Baghdad fears Iraqi Police, not just coalition forces."

A hard-bitten Soviet diplomat once said that a great nation doesn't change its foreign policy every five minutes.  Neither does a qualified candidate for president.  I said "qualified."

July 15, 2008.      Permalink          

FIRST EVENING UPDATE:  JULY 15,  2008

Posted at 6:58 p.m. ET

DRILL!

We are a petroleum-based economy. Even if we do technological handstands, and launch a Manhattan Project for new energy sources, it will be decades before we are freed from oil.  In that time, if demand exceeds supply - as is happening now - the price of gas at the pump can soar even higher, and the cost of everything that has to be transported will increase.  The economic damage will be staggering.

The immediate answer is to drill, and hope new oil becomes available fast enough to prevent an economic disaster.  Larry Kudlow at NRO notes what happened when President Bush called for new drilling yesterday:

In a dramatic move yesterday President Bush removed the executive-branch moratorium on offshore drilling. Today, at a news conference, Bush repeated his new position, and slammed the Democratic Congress for not removing the congressional moratorium on the Outer Continental Shelf and elsewhere. Crude-oil futures for August delivery plunged $9.26, or 6.3 percent, almost immediately as Bush was speaking, bringing the barrel price down to $136.

Now isn’t this interesting?

Democrats keep saying that it will take 10 years or longer to produce oil from the offshore areas. And they say that oil prices won’t decline for at least that long. And they, along with Obama and McCain, bash so-called oil speculators. And today we had a real-world example as to why they are wrong. All of them. Reid, Pelosi, Obama, McCain — all of them.

Traders took a look at a feisty and aggressive George Bush and started selling the market well before a single new drop of oil has been lifted. What does this tell us? Well, if Congress moves to seal the deal, oil prices will probably keep on falling. That’s the way traders work. They discount the future. Psychology and expectations can turn on a dime.

The congressional ban on offshore drilling expires September 30, so that becomes a key date. A new report from Wall Street research house Sanford C. Bernstein says that California actually could start producing new oil within one year if the moratorium were lifted.

Convinced?  I am.  Let's get the machinery going.

July 15, 2008.      Permalink          

AFTERNOON POST:  JULY 15,  2008

Posted at 3:02 p.m. ET

POLLS

Both trackers today show a one-point gain for Obama, hardly worth noting unless there is a trend.  Rasmussen has Obama up two, whereas Gallup has him up four.

A new poll by Quinnipiac has Obama up nine.  This is an outlier, well outside the range of all recent polls.

Obama's general decline in the polls, although not by much, has generated a number of articles questioning his campaign, as we noted this morning.  Next week, though, he goes on his magical mystery tour of Europe and the Mideast.  It could be a publicity triumph for him.  Then again, if he commits a gaffe, or appears to think he's already president, there could be an adverse reaction. 

July 15, 2008.      Permalink          

TUESDAY:  JULY 15,  2008

Posted at 7:20 a.m. ET

CAUTION ON OBAMA

If polls are to be believed, and we're always cautious, Barack Obama has slipped in the polls.  That itself would not be much of a headline, since polls fluctuate during an election campaign.  But several factors merge to make any decline by Obama a serious story.  First, this is, supposedly, a Democratic year, the year when liberalism was set to rise from the dead and rule over the Earth.  If one accepts that proposition, Obama should be substantially ahead, and he is not.  Second, McCain hasn't been especially effective as a campaigner.  Since you can't beat somebody with nobody, that should have pushed Obama even further ahead.  Third, Obama is a cool, attractive, candidate who delivers a powerful piece of rhetoric, and does excite people, especially the young.  Add that factor to the statistical expectations.  Fourth, Obama is the anti-Bush at a time when there aren't too many in the pro column.

But the race is essentially even.  What is worse for Obama, he's now well-known, so people aren't responding blindly. 

Is Obama in trouble?  It's been widely noted that he barely crawled across the finish line to win the Democratic nomination.  His was no "triumph."  Do people tire of him?  Is the rhetoric ultimately boring or repelling? 

Several writers weigh in this morning on the newest phase of the Obama phenomenon:  The lack of it.

July 15, 2008.       Permalink               

REMORSE?

In a well-researched piece, Steve Kornacki of the New York Observer wonders whether something we've seen in previous elections might be at work right now.  He bases his thoughts on Obama's dip in the polls.

Pundits talked about Obama's rosy prospects, McCain's numerous and potentially insurmountable challenges, and the possibility that November wouldn't produce merely a Democratic victory but a realigning landslide. The average voter didn't digest any of the details of these forecasts, but the sheer volume was loud enough for the masses to receive the message that Obama had emerged as the clear favorite.

And that raises the possibility that what we're seeing is the result of some soft Obama supporters backing away as the idea of an Obama victory has become more real. In effect, a small but significant slice of the electorate may be saying, "Hold on a second here--are we sure about this?"

There is a precedent for this kind of thinking in presidential politics. The most famous example came in the fall of 1976, when Gerald Ford battled his way back from a mammoth 33-point deficit against Jimmy Carter. Ford capped his methodical comeback the weekend before the election when polls showed him - for the first time in the entire campaign--pulling ahead of Carter. The prospect of Ford actually winning the election sparked some widespread second-guessing among his softest supporters. Hang on, they seemed to say, are we really going to give four more years to the guy who pardoned Nixon? After two months of steady gains, Ford's support dropped that final weekend and Carter won the race by two points.

And...

Something similar happened in 1980 with Ronald Reagan. Given his iconic status now, it's hard to appreciate just how grave the public's reservations were about Reagan's ideology, temperament, and age, but Reagan couldn't create and sustain a substantial lead in the polls against Carter for almost the entire fall of '80--even though the political climate was absolutely poisonous for Carter. When Reagan would seem to pull ahead, the polls would quickly tighten, a pattern that prevailed until the final week of the campaign, when Reagan's convincing and reassuring debate performance vaulted him into a clear lead that he didn't relinquish.

Finally...

But it's not unheard of for the prospect of a candidate's victory to cause a measurable chunk of voters to get cold feet. It happened to Gerald Ford and to Ronald Reagan and it's happened in numerous state-level contests through the years. It looks like it's something that Barack Obama has to deal with too.

I think Kornacki is on to something.  The one word you hear constantly when Obama is discussed is "doubt."  He simply hasn't made the sale.  And, unlike Reagan, who served as governor of our largest state for two terms, Obama has a list of credits small enough to fit on half a 3x5 card.  There's nothing for voters to grab hold of, nothing of substance for them to judge.

But the key is whether McCain, like a good general, will exploit his advantage or let his opponent escape.  He's just shaken up his campaign.  He needs to shake up the race to sow more doubt about Obama, more buyer's remorse in the Democratic Party.  If I were McCain, I'd want to set Obama back to the point where Hillary Clinton supporters resurrect their dream, and try to turn the Democratic convention around.  Unlikely, yes.  But you never know what poll numbers can do to the psychology of a party.

July 15, 2008.      Permalink              

SOWELL

Thomas Sowell is one of the best writers around today.  Now he examines Obama's casualness with the truth, surely something that is weakening the Barack barrage, and raising doubts, even among his supporters.

As the hypnotic mantra of "change" is repeated endlessly, few people even raise the question of whether what few specifics we hear represent any real change, much less a change for the better.

Raising taxes, increasing government spending and demonizing business? That is straight out of the New Deal of the 1930s.

The New Deal was new then but it is not new now. Moreover, increasing numbers of economists and historians have concluded that New Deal policies are what prolonged the Great Depression.

Putting new restrictions of international trade, in order to save American jobs? That was done by Herbert Hoover, when he signed the Hawley-Smoot tariff when the unemployment rate was 9 percent. The next year the unemployment rate was 16 percent and, before the Great Depression was over, unemployment hit 25 percent.

Well, that should give the Obama staff indigestion this morning.

Politicians' top priority is to solve their own problem, which is how to get elected and then re-elected. Barack Obama is a politician through and through, even though pretending that he is not is his special strategy to get elected.

We have just had a moment of truth.  Real truth.  Truth we can believe in.

If you are a nurse or mechanic who will be depending on your pension to take care of you when you retire-- as Social Security is unlikely to do-- you may not think of yourself as one of the privileged. But unless you connect the dots between capital gains tax rates and your retirement income, you may fall under the spell of the well-honed Obama rhetoric.

Obama is for higher minimum wage rates. Does anyone care what actually happens in countries with higher minimum wage rates? Of course not.

Economists may point to studies done in countries around the world, showing that higher minimum wage rates usually mean higher unemployment rates among lower skilled and less experienced workers.

Facts?  Who needs them?  When have sophisticated liberals, the better people, ever needed facts?

Nowhere do facts matter less than in foreign policy issues. Nothing is more popular than the notion that you can deal with dangers from other nations by talking with their leaders.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain became enormously popular in the 1930s by sitting down and talking with Hitler, and announcing that their agreement had produced "peace in our time"-- just one year before the most catastrophic war in history began.

I wish Sowell were running instead of the others.  His case is compelling.  Now, the McCain people should study what he's written and try to apply it to the campaign.  Treat the voters like adults, give them the facts and nail Obama on those same facts.  It won't move most people, but it will move enough to win an election.  And that is the only acceptable outcome.

July 15, 2008.       Permalink