The Final Straw for Obama?

For the last month, as the Democrats' nominee-in-waiting for the Presidential race has been underperforming his party's generic advantage by at least 10 points, in a statistical tie with Republican John McCain in nearly every poll despite the allegedly radioactive Republican brand. A combination of the bitterly divisive primary race with Hillary Clinton and a number of personal scandals have done immeasurable damage to Barack Obama, a candidate whose skin color is unfortunately working against him, particularly in working-class majority white areas east of the Mississippi River. Nonetheless, we've been told by the commentariat that Obama can problem weather the storm of those past controversies as long as nothing new emerges.

Well, this week, something new emerged....and watching the video on the evening news tonight, I'm wondering if this will be the final straw for him.

Once again, at the center of the controversy is Obama's church, where a guest pastor (actually a white Catholic priest with some serious confusion about his own racial identity!) flamboyantly called Hillary a white supremacist....to a crowd of cheering parishioners....the same people Obama claims are an integral part of his faith community. To put it bluntly, he's screwed. The church that has become such a vital part of this campaign has just outed itself as warm to a message of racial intolerance and separatism. Until this week, it was Reverend Wright alone who represented the scary face of Obama's church. Now, voters recognize those sentiments in the church are not just limited to Wright.

Expect this story to snowball through several news cycles the same way the Jeremiah Wright story did, with demands for more and more apologies from Obama, and Obama ending up looking weak by ultimately capitulating to the endless demands to apologize for a guest pastor who spoke at his church when he wasn't there.

There was little doubt that race would end up becoming the central theme of this race, admirable as Obama has been personally in not playing the race card. It was painfully obvious that many of Obama's overzealous supporters would cry racism early and often, but I am a little surprised how so many people so close to Obama are personally responsible for so many of his biggest problems. This Catholic priest, for example. How could he have not known that those comments would cause a blistering political firestorm that would HURT Obama, and hurt him badly? It's gotta be a nightmare for Obama himself, particularly at this juncture of the campaign where so many Hillary supporters already have serious reservations about him. For this priest, however loosely connected to Obama, to make racist AND sexist comments about Hillary Clinton will produce one more obstacle for Obama to overcome in his outreach efforts to Hillary supporters. This scandal has probably emerged too late in the campaign to deny Obama the nomination, but I suspect it will be looked back at as the point of no return abyss next November after Obama loses.

Now, for a brief word on John McCain.....

The media talking point since February when McCain secured the nomination has been that "McCain is the ONLY Republican capable of winning this November". Hogwash! McCain has had the luxury of marinating in fawning media coverage ever since his 2000 Presidential campaign, and thus has high approval ratings among independent voters. But the support is a mile wide and an inch thick. McCain's policy prescriptions are almost all assembly line Reagan-era leftovers whose appeal have hit record lows among voters in the last couple of years. The more McCain talks about what he plans to do as President, the less enamored voters will be of him.

Luckily for McCain, voters don't elect Presidents based on policy positions, they elect Presidents based on personality and gut-level cultural connections. McCain used to wear the "nice guy" mask well when a camera was in his face, but in the throes of a high-profile Presidential campaign, we're seeing more of the Mr. Hyde side of McCain that everybody in Washington has already seen behind closed doors. With increased regularity, McCain is coming off a smug, insufferable smartass who cannot contain his dripping condenscension towards anyone he either disagrees with or views as unworthy of sharing a stage with him. We saw it in virtually ever exchange McCain had with Willard "Mitt" Romney in the primaries, and it looks like that was a warmup act for McCain's monthslong campaign of smugness towards Barack Obama that lies ahead. And given that Obama has shown great skill at knowing how to push McCain's button without looking out-of-bounds himself, McCain is almost certain to behave in such a way that diminishes his "guy you'd like to have a beer with" appeal that's worked so well for him so far and helped elect George W. Bush twice.

With all of that said, I don't believe McCain is "the only Republican who could have won the Presidency this year". I'm not even entirely convinced he was the most electable Republican in the primary race, as Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee would still be able to take advantage of the millions who don't trust Obama while hanging onto all of the conservative vote, a certain percentage of which will never support McCain due to his alleged past acts of treason against the conservative movement.

McCain will almost certainly win, but it may end up being closer than most expect, not because McCain is such a good candidate able to win over independents no other Republican would be able to this year, as the media likes to tell us, but in spite of the fact that he's a flawed candidate whose age and increasingly prickly demeanor turned him into a guy swing voters only pulled the lever for because he was the "lesser of two evils". John Kerry, if he were untainted by his 2004 campaign and subsequent faux paus, would be able to beat John McCain in 2008. Luckily for McCain, he's probably gonna be running against Barack Obama, who seems destined to become a politically skilled equivalent of unelectable Michael Dukakis once the cultural war whores finish smacking him around.