Obama: Too Wimpy To Be President?

The way things are going, you have to ask yourself if Barack Obama really wants to be President. Coming off a triumphant and nearly flawless convention, three to six points ahead in the opinion polls, facing an apparently weak opponent who wasn't particularly loved even by his own party, Obama was blindsided when McCain, who turned out to be far less moribund or dull-witted than he'd appeared, completely outmaneuvered him with his wily pick of the Alaskan pit bull for VP.

Since then the tables have turned completely, and it's Obama who looks like he's sleepwalking into oblivion. Oh sure, he's still putting forth solid, sensible proposals couched in crystal-clear and at times downright elegant language, but suddenly nobody is listening. They're too busy watching Obama get pummeled and pushed and bullied every which way from Sunday by a doddering old wreck and his strident female sidekick.

When it comes to making a scripted presentation to a stadium or lecture hall full of adoring followers, there's no one in the business who comes close to Obama (though Palin shows signs of giving him a run for his money). But in the rough and tumble cut and thrust of everyday politicking, Obama is like a deer caught in the headlights, the skinny kid on the playground who bullies naturally gravitate to, and who tries, usually with humiliating results, to reason his his way out of his predicament.

Americans like a little testosterone in their Presidents, and Obama is showing none. Joe Sixpack can be forgiven for asking how a President Obama would stand up to the Russians or Islamic terrorism if he turns to jelly in the face of insults from an inarticulate old man and a glib but ultimately silly woman. Even I, though I still want Obama to win, can't help wondering if he's up to the job.

This whole ridiculous lipstick-on-a-pig business (a phrase, by the way, that McCain used himself last year, and that Vice-President Cheney used at least three times during the 2004 campaign), for example: it's the perfect opportunity for Obama to stand up tall, and with an appropriate measure of disgust, say to the American people, "They (McCain and Palin) must think you're really stupid." He used that phrase once in reference to McCain's newfound strategy of selling himself as an agent of change, but he should make it his mantra, repeating it every time some Republican operative or talk show host tries to hijack the discussion into the realm of preposterous namecalling and accusations, every time McCain or his minions trot out yet another lie about taxes or national defense or "change."

Instead he staggers from one onslaught to the next, barely able to mount a credible defense, let alone the sort of scorched-earth offense he needs to lay on the bald-faced liars running the Republican campaign. Why isn't he? Either he's being very badly advised or he simply lacks the character.

Obviously I'm hoping for the former but fearing the latter. Could it be that Obama so resolutely plays Mr. Nicey-Nice-Above-The-Fray because he's wary of coming across to his white supporters as an Angry Black Man? Possibly, but if so he's already taken it way too far. Or maybe his mother taught him never to pick on girls, which might explain why he circles warily but speechlessly around The Palin while she's busily running off with his female voters. Or - and here's a touchy subject - could it be his experience with affirmative action, and its implicit lesson that adequate is a reasonable substitute for excellent?

Obama has refused to discuss whether he was a beneficiary of affirmative action, but given the period when he went to college and the college he attended (Harvard has been especially assiduous in its pursuit of minority students, perhaps in hopes of defusing its longstanding reputation as a bastion of white male elitism) make it fairly likely. The bitter irony is that, as demonstrated daily by his obvious erudition, he had no need of affirmative action programs, but that doesn't mean he couldn't have been part of one, nor that he didn't absorb one of affirmative action's most pernicious lessons: that second or third best is more than good enough when combined with the "right" skin color.

I'd hate for any of this to be true, and love for Obama to prove me wrong by coming out kicking and screaming and cussing and punching on tomorrow morning's news. But I hope for the best while fearing the worst: that once again the Democrats will hand the country over to the radical right not through a paucity of ideas but from a failure of nerve. If nothing else - if Obama just can't bring himself to say something mean about his opponents - get Hillary Clinton on the case. Promise her Secretary of State or whatever else her little heart desires, but turn her loose on McCain and Palin and I guarantee you'll see some results. You might also get people wondering, "Tell me again why we nominated him instead of her," but that's the chance the Democrats have got to take. Unless of course they - and you - are quite happy with the way things are.

(Not So) Beautiful Losers

Up until Obama gave his acceptance speech Thursday night, I'd been mentally composing a diatribe about how the Democrats seemed to place more of a premium on looking good in defeat than on actually gaining and wielding power. You're familiar with the syndrome, I'm sure, especially if you live in or near one of our latte-sipping capitals: people looking up from their copy of the Times or the New Yorker to deliver a pursed-lip sneer at "that idiot Bush" or "those red state morons" when in fact they are more interested in validating their own cultural and moral superiority than in actually doing the hardscrabble work necessary to effect an actual change in the way government works (or, as increasingly seems to be the case, fails to).

We saw Al Gore and John Kerry in turn throw away what should have been easy victories because of their petulant "I can do it myself, Mommy" refusal to wield the slightly tacky but still powerful weapon that was Bill Clinton, and by their slightly wonky, cerebrally aloof manner that alienated millions of potential Democratic voters who might have sensed that George W. Bush had little if anything in common with their interests, but nonetheless related to him because he came across like a normal human being instead of a computer-generated composite candidate.

I'm still concerned that Obama will manage to blow the election in a not dissimilar manner, even though - or perhaps because - he comes across as being at least twice as smart and ten times more eloquent than the disastrous Gore-Kerry diumvirate. Even though I don't particularly care for Hillary Clinton, I was astounded when Obama chose, with all due respect, an old hack like Joe Biden as his VP candidate when putting Hillary on the ticket would have virtually guaranteed him victory in November. That plus a summer of waffling and a few too many platitudes had me convinced that we had yet another presidential contender who was more concerned about looking good in defeat than doing what it took to win.

Obama's rousing football stadium performance went some way toward allaying my concerns, though I in no way thought it the masterpiece of oratory that the MSNBC and CNN talking heads seem to think it was. Are none of them old enough to have seen a Kennedy speech, I wondered (that's JFK, not Bobby, who in my opinion suffered from Obama-itis himself)? My criterion: if I'm watching something on TV, be it a political speech, a movie, a football game, whatever, and find myself gradually starting to poke around on the internet instead of paying full attention, then something's lacking. Granted, when as a young boy I listened to Kennedy speak, he didn't have to compete with the internet or much else in that pre-multimedia age. But what made his rhetoric so riveting was the way he could artfully blend the profound and the profane, mixing high concept political philosophy with down and dirty ward politics. Obama comes closer to that level of discourse than any politician I've seen since the days of JFK, but he's not there yet, and bear in mind that Kennedy barely won the election (some say it was just as surely stolen as was Bush's 2000 triumph) against an opponent considerably less attractive (though perhaps with a bit more substance) than John McCain.

Still, the Obama show was as impressive a spectacle as anyone has seen in American politics in recent memory, if ever, and if they'd gone whole hog and hired the Chinese architects of the Olympics opening ceremony to orchestrate it, the election might have been all wrapped up by Friday morning. Until, that is, wily John McCain took advantage of Obama's nixing-Hillary blunder to slip a fast one past the Democrats by nominating a VP out of far right field and instantly wipe about 90% of the orgy of wasn't-Obama-wonderful musings right off the media map.

True to form, Democrats laughed and sneered at the seemingly oddball choice of Sarah Palin, and you can't entirely blame them. While Obama's rally offered at least a whiff of Triumph Of The Will, McCain's unveiling of Palin was pure, unabashed Babbitry. To see McCain awkwardly pawing at the undeniably milfish governor was a bit like nervously watching grandpa at a wedding when he's had more than his customary glass of wine and has possibly forgotten to take his meds: part cringeworthy, part appalled fascination at the prospect of what he might say or do next.

But Palin herself, though far to the right of mainstream America, has a powerful presence that, even if it only energizes the previously uninspired or disenchanted evangelicals, is going to considerably strengthen the McCain ticket. Even though I strongly disagree with her on the great majority of issues, I found her very likable, and imagine she would be a heck of a lot more fun to hang out with than Joe Biden or perhaps even Obama himself. George Bush won his elections, despite also being ideologically out of step with most Americans, on similar grounds, even though his clownish wisecracks and self-deprecating humor never completely disguised the bullying frat boy that was also a part of his persona. Unless Palin does or says something incredibly stupid in the coming campaign (or if the thousands of researchers and bloggers already engaged in frantic archeological excavations of her entire life and career come up with some real scandal), she'll be a more formidable candidate than Bush ever was, to the point where Republican partisans might start to wonder why McCain is heading the ticket instead of her.

The election is still Obama's to lose, but none of this drama would have had to happen if he'd taken the obvious and common sense step of appointing Hillary as his running mate. Hey, JFK by all accounts could barely stand Lyndon Johnson, but he knew that all his high-faluting ideas about New Frontiers and torches being passed to a new generation would amount to zilch if he didn't first accomplish the task of winning the election. I'm not advocating an all-out Macchiavellian approach here, just a little old-fashioned pragmatism. Hell, I don't even know if Obama would turn out to be a great Kennedy-esque President, or a disastrous Carter-esque one (at this point I'd settle, albeit reluctantly, for a reprise of Bill Clinton), but in light of the crises and challenges facing the world today, I think taking a chance on Obama seems immeasurably more appealing than continuing with the dreary rendezvous with catastrophe that the Bush interregnum has proved to be. Now it just remains to be seen whether Obama wants it bad enough to make it happen.