Nary a hard question from supporters

Hammer. Nail. Head. John F. Harris & Jim Vandehei explain the nuances of the Democrat primary, and their point is positively spot-on:

Why, ask many Democrats and media commentators, won’t Hillary Rodham Clinton see the long odds against her, put her own ambitions aside, and gracefully embrace Barack Obama as the inevitable Democratic nominee?

Here is why: She and Bill Clinton both devoutly believe that Obama’s likely victory is a disaster-in-waiting. Naive Democrats just don’t see it. And a timid, pro-Obama press corps, in their view, won’t tell the story.

But Hillary Clinton won’t tell it, either. A lot of coverage of the Clinton campaign supposes them to be in kitchen-sink mode — hurling every pot and pan, no matter the damage this might do to Obama as the likely Democratic nominee in the fall. In fact, the Democratic race has not been especially rough by historical standards.

What’s more, our conversations with Democrats who speak to the Clintons make plain that their public comments are only the palest version of what they really believe: that if Obama is the nominee, a likely Democratic victory would turn to a near-certain defeat. Far from a no-holds-barred affair, the Democratic contest has been an exercise in self-censorship.

Rip off the duct tape and here is what they would say: Obama has serious problems with Jewish voters (goodbye Florida), working-class whites (goodbye Ohio) and Hispanics (goodbye, New Mexico).

Republicans will also ruthlessly exploit openings that Clinton — in the genteel confines of an intraparty contest — never could. Top targets: Obama’s radioactive personal associations, his liberal ideology, his exotic life story, his coolly academic and elitist style.

This view has been an article of faith among Clinton advisers for months, but it got powerful new affirmation last week with Obama’s clumsy ruminations about why “bitter” small-town voters turn to guns and God. There’s nothing to say that the Clintonites are right about Obama’s presumed vulnerabilities. But one argument seems indisputably true: Obama is on the brink of the Democratic nomination without having had to confront head-on the evidence about his general election challenges.

Bingo. He hasn't had to answer a single, difficult and demanding question. His speeches and stump stops have contained flowery rhetoric of hope and change. Media personalities practically faint when speaking to him. Some are even apprehensive to ask him arduous or problematic questions. After all, does anyone recall if any member of the media ever asked him "Why did you lie about hearing the sermons of Jeremiah Wright?" after he admitted he did in his speech on race; it directly contradicted his statement made just three days prior that he hadn't heard any sermons that carried the controversial rhetoric that got Wright into trouble in the first place. (Let me just clue you in that NO ONE in the media ever asked him that question; NO ONE confronted him on his admitted lie. You can Google it if you want to, but we have already, and no one in the media seemed content to ask that question.)

This is the problem for his campaign. As conservatives, we -- Marcie and myself -- vet the candidates to determine if any of them are: A) electable, B) conservative, and C) hiding skeletons in their closet that could be detrimental. No conservative I know of blindly follows a candidate (Paul-nuts are excused; it wasn't a campaign. It was a movement. I'll explain this in a moment). We do go over each and every candidate who announces an intention of running for the presidency with as fine toothed a comb we can. There wasn't a single candidate this time around who didn't have something weakening them. Hell, we didn't expect McCain to be the nominee. Imagine our surprise as we did predict he wouldn't be the nominee. Caveat -- we did state repeatedly that he could be the nominee if something drastic happened. Three drastic things happened.

Rudy Giuliani, who had led the pack from the start, suffered from a severe lack of any sort of strategy. He didn't participate in any of the earlier primaries, opting to hold the line in Florida. He met with disastrous results.

Fred Thompson rode the wave of public support into joining the race, but he waited far too long, raised far too little money, and continued to show the public a lackluster effort.

Mitt Romney had the charisma, the money, the strategy of competing in each state, but in the end he simply couldn't get any traction. Many will attribute the lack of support on his "flip-flops," and some will point to the Mormon question. Either way, he bowed out, and has been trying to be chummy with McCain in a bid to be his running mate. Not a bad strategy, and a smart move for the future, but it remains to be seen if McCain will take that step.

But thanks to those three events, McCain slid into the cat-bird seat, and never really looked behind him as Mike Huckabee was irrelevant at that point. He still is despite a recent announcement he's creating a Romney-like PAC to help conservatives mulling a run for office; any office.

This leads me back to what i was going to say about Paul's campaign, and why it mirrors Obama's so closely. Like Obama, Paul didn't want to answer any serious sort of question. Whatever one would ask him, it would never be answered, and you'd be "entertained" by an answer that involves everything to the abolishment of the IRS, putting us back on the Gold Standard, and how the Founding Fathers never envisioned a government like this. While all are sound ideas, he comes off as an unhinged crank. Paul supporters should take note of Obama's movement. And it is a movement.

Movements are rooted in emotion. Followers are hearing what they want to hear. Someone cares. Someone knows the plight of the average man. And he keeps telling everyone he will do everything he can to set things straight. That is as much Ron Paul as it is Barack Obama. Neither was specific on how they were going to do things, and Obama is actually worse. With Ron Paul, the scale down he was referring to was a lot. His promise was to reduce spending. OK. We doubt he could have accomplished a quarter of what he proposed, and he had as much chance at winning the presidency as Dennis Kucinich did. (Pssst! House members aren't elected president guys. Half the nation barely knows half of their House delegation. Hardcore political junkies, like ourselves, even have a hard time naming the ones we do know.)

How is Obama more dangerous? His naivete is stark; inexperience simply exudes from him. Beneath the rhetoric, he has little clue about the world, and how our government works. He is also heavy on the spending side -- the literal, guaranteed growth of an already over-bloated federal government. His questionable relations, and his claimed ignorance of the most controversial aspects of those relationships, leaves people to wonder if he's willfully ignorant and not to aware of things, or if he's in bed with, or embraces, those relationships.

The Rezko trial continues to bring up Obama's name, and the list of those the two shared as friends continues to grow.

He still refuses to repudiate James Meeks and Jeremiah Wright. It matters not if you were "unaware" or didn't "personally witness" the statements. They're in the news, and neither denies what they've said.

The movement won't survive a general election campaign. Sooner or later questions will arise that actually have teeth, and will draw blood in his campaign. There is simply no avoiding it. Look at presidential elections over the last sixty years, or so, and tell us that Obama will skate through the general election season without being tripped up. Presidential elections nowadays are simply a question of who is the least bloodied candidate at the end. In 2004 John Kerry couldn't land a punch on Bush, but the alternative media shredded Kerry over his lies and gaffes. In the end, in 2004, the mantra back to Kerry was "I was actually for the $87 billion before I was against it." It summed up his campaign.

Obama's got plenty of gaffes to draw from. The question is not when he will be dealt a death blow, but when the movement will suffer it. Being emotional, the movement won't adapt. It'll disband. Eventually the emotion will give out, even if the movement doesn't suffer a blow. You can't run on emotion all the time, and that's all his campaign has. Eventually the support will grow tired, bored, and disinterested in hearing the same old song and dance.

Publius II