Obama Glow Fading?

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In late June, Newsweek magazine announced poll results that showed Barack Obama with a 51-36 lead over John McCain. At the time, Nikitas3.com editorialized:
 
Meanwhile, a new Newsweek poll shows Obama with a 51-36 lead over McCain. While this is intended to stimulate the chattering classes and frighten conservatives, we can take comfort in the fact that Newsweek has morphed into a far-left publication that can and will conveniently skew the polls any way it wants.

For instance pollsters know that phone surveys conducted at certain times of the day or week will produce results biased one way or another. Or people in certain demographic zones will tilt one way or the other. And that the polls can be rigged by the questions asked, or even by their sequence.

So as Newsweek can bias its polls any way it wants, a Gallup poll done at the same time showed Obama 46 to McCain’s 44. Another Fox poll: Obama 45, McCain 41.
 
Now, however, pollster Rasmussen calls the race tied 43-43, while even Newsweek reported on July 11 under the headline Glow Fading? that the presidential race had become a statistical tie, with Obama leading McCain by only 3 points, 44 to 41.

Said Newsweek of the tighter race:
 
Obama’s rapid drop comes at a strategically challenging moment for the Democratic candidate. Having vanquished Hillary Clinton in early June, Obama quickly went about repositioning himself for a general-election audience, an unpleasant task for any nominee emerging from the pander-heavy primary contests…

Obama’s reversal on FISA legislation, his support of faith-based initiatives and his decision to opt out of the campaign public financing system left him open to charges he was a flip-flopper.
 
We are seeing reality setting in on Obama. During primary season, Obama was winning way out of proportion to what he should have expected, like a baseball team on a hot streak. But as any knowledgeable observer knows, races always tighten. Dukakis was 20 points head of Bush 41 in June 1988 then lost 40 states in November.

What should be most unnerving is that Obama is hemorrhaging support from two sources in his own party that he repeatedly has been warned about — his activist left-wing flank as he tacks to the center; and Hillary Clinton supporters who had vowed to desert him over the party’s treatment of their gal.

And more importantly, these two shifts speak to the established psychology of the election - that Obama is inevitable, that Obama knows all, that Obama can do no wrong.

So with these two political brush fires joining forces to become a firestorm with unpredictable volatility, Obama may start to naturally appear more vulnerable and more mistake-prone, to seem more human, to be considered more skeptically, and to see an electorate more likely to give McCain a second look. After all, McCain is The Comeback Kid of 2008, who practically was wiped out in Summer 2007, and now is the Republican nominee.

As for Obama, with the array of political shifts to the center, the internet-savvy, often-young, often-radicalized and always zealous volunteer corps that would have been willing to knock on every door in America to elect The Old Barack now is dispirited and getting angry with The New Barack who is fishing for votes in Middle America, of which the radicals want no part.

It wasn’t just their votes that Obama needed, however, but their sense of contagious enthusiasm. And as the Illinois Senator moves strikingly toward the Bush agenda, he finds himself McCained. His plunge in popularity is coming from his loss of votes in his own Democrat party ‘base’, just as McCain lost the enthusiasm of those on the right as he distanced himself from Bush and conservative doctrine.

But timing is the the important distinction between the two cases. McCain’s estrangement has come over many years. He angered conservatives with his insistent jabs at Bush going back to 2000 when he lost the primary battle. Since then he has opposed tax cuts and co-sponsored the free-speech-dousing McCain-Feingold campaign law.

Obama is having the McCain experience, but highly compressed. Obama still is very much unknown, and the adulation over his candidacy inflated quickly, and now may be deflating just as fast. His long battle with Hillary Clinton finally is hurting him with many of her supporters vowing to go McCain and now making good on that threat.  Even Hillary confidante Howard Wolfson has called the much-maligned Fox News cable channel the fairest of the campaign, and he has become a Fox political analyst.

Interesting…

What Obama needs to be on guard for is the reversal of fortune that could cripple him. It may not be anything specific, but just something in the air, perhaps more scrutiny for things he was able to dismiss previously.

For instance when he recently mocked the Ugly American stereotype who cannot speak a foreign language and then added that “You need to make sure your child can speak Spanish…” voters may now be deciding that such a comment, once disposable, is suspicious. When added to Reverend Wright, Michelle Obama’s comments about not being proud of America, and Obama’s connections with terrorist William Ayers, repressed doubts could spring to the fore.

Adding to the mix was Jesse Jackson’s open mic comment that “Barack’s been talkin’ down to black people”. This type of quote could arouse the old suspicion among African-Americans that Obama is not ‘black enough’, since his mother was white.

The type of doubt can grow. Obama might suddenly find his once-gleeful audiences less cheerful, and his magical glow tarnished. Then again, this may be counterbalanced by McCain and his ongoing gaffes, while the choice for Vice President could rejigger the campaign math somewhat.

For now, Obama is seeing a shift in his inevitable momentum that could be the beginning of the end. But as they say, four months until Election Day is a lifetime in politics. It’s just that the energy for Obama’s candidacy could become one of the caricatures that Hillary Clinton painted of him last Spring, that maybe this guy just isn’t cut out to “your” President of the United States.

If a Republican runs as a Democrat against a Democrat, the Democrat usually wins. If Obama continues to move right to run against center-right Republican McCain, he will probably will lose because Americans in the end respect McCain and his decades of service to the nation.

Because they may end up deciding that they just do not know enough about the Senator from Illinois to make him their fearless leader for 4 long years.

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