FOUR DAYS

Posted at 7:08 a.m. ET

Only four days remain until the Democrats meet.   They're flying into Denver already, eager to get there.  After all, Colorado is familiar turf.  The ski slopes of Aspen at times serve as a second home to the party elite, which meets there whenever social schedules permit, and agonizes over the ecologically unsound ways of the American peasantry.

It could have been a much happier gathering.  Democrats no doubt pictured themselves attending a harmonious, low-crab victory party, with many of them eager to serve in the administration of, check one, the first black or first female president.  But a funny thing happened to Democrats on their way to the meeting.  The American people spoke up.  They reminded the party that voters have the final say, and that voters like occasionally to be consulted.

Barack Obama is slumping in the polls.  The usual articles are out blaming racism, and there are, no doubt, some cross burners out there.  But if racism is the cause of the slump, how does one account for Obama's earlier surge to the pinnacle of rock stardom?  Did Americans not realize that he's black?  Have the flat-screen TVs had tint problems?  As my old teacher, Johnny Carson, used to say, I did not know that.

Obama is declining because he's run a terrible campaign - arrogant, aloof, and free of thought.  And John McCain has come alive, the reassuring presence of the grandfather you look to when wisdom is needed.  McCain hasn't made the sale any more than Obama has, but he's looking better and better to an America that's just watched Russian tanks on the move, and just saw the Democratic congress adjourn without accomplishing much of anything.  The price of gas at the pump doesn't bother a party whose base thinks the internal combustion engine is a fascist plot.

So what will Obama do?  He must choose a vice president, but not one name being mentioned, except Clinton, will arouse the faithful.  He must deliver an acceptance speech, but his speeches have become familiar and tiresome.  He must run a convention, but the list of speakers may remind voters that the party of Roosevelt and Truman died in 1968.  No one under 60 recalls it.

At the end of the convention, Obama is likely to be the same person he is today.  The agent of change will run a conventional campaign, try moving to the center, pull a few Chicago tricks, hint at a racial backlash if he's defeated, and may squeeze it out come November.  But he's not the man America thought he was, whereas McCain, with all his faults, is exactly the man America thought he was.  We can hope that Americans will choose the real McCain. 

August 21, 2008.