Obama's problems

Jonah Goldberg:

The Democrats are having their flop-sweat moment. Barack Obama should be way out in front. The Republicans are in terrible shape. There hasn't been a more battered brand name since Bart Simpson swallowed a jagged metal "O" from his box of Krusty-O's cereal. The GOP has nominated an old white-haired dude, in Paris Hilton's words, who makes Dick Cheney look like a lambada champion. He'll be the kind of president who will yell from the Oval Office window, "You kids get off my lawn!" The economy isn't roadkill quite yet; it's sort of like wounded roadkill, flopping around, unable to get going but unwilling to lay down and die.

And yet, John McCain is pulling ahead of Obama. The latest Reuters poll has Grandpa Munster up five percentage points over our secular messiah. The Real Clear Politics average of polls has Obama and McCain in a virtual tie. And, according to RCP, if the race were held today and McCain took the toss-up states where he's currently ahead, he'd be the next president. Yes, it's early. McCain has had a good couple weeks. But these were McCain's first good couple weeks since he secured the nomination. Meanwhile, with the exception of the Jeremiah Wright unpleasantness, Obama has had a good couple years.

The winds at the Democrats' backs are hurricane-force gales, and yet there's Obama holding steady, like a young Dan Rather in his schoolgirl rain slicker, immobile and unmovable.

Ask the typical Obama supporter why this should be so and you'll get a range of answers. Some just stare at the poll numbers the way my late basset hound would look at me when I tried to feed him a grape: with pure unblinking incomprehension. Others act like the guy who sits alone with his shopping bags at the public library, muttering about Fox News conspiracies and how Karl Rove-like aliens are doing terrible things with probes of proctological exactitude. Still others just shake their heads at the racism of anyone who could possibly have a problem with a very left-wing politician with almost no experience, who often sounds like his campaign slogan is: "People of Earth! Stop Your Bickering. I Am From Harvard, And I'm Here To Help."

Perhaps therein lies the answer to this supposed mystery. Indeed, perhaps there's no mystery at all, and Obama's problems are the same problems Democrats always have at the presidential level: He's an elitist.

Oh, I know. Upon reading that, some liberal spluttered herbal chai tea from her nose at the injustice of this whole elitist canard, and the earnest Ivy League interns at some liberal magazine have burst into laughter, offering the appropriate bons mots from Balzac at the preposterousness of such a suggestion, saying: "Don't you conservatives understand? Democrats care about the little guy. They're on the side of the proletariat -- I mean workers -- and as Obama has so eloquently put it, if the workers would only stop clinging to their silly sky god and guns, they'd understand that."

Liberalism is often a problem at the presidential level. Cultural liberalism is a burden. Haughty cultural liberalism is a disaster in the making. For good or ill, the presidency is a cultural institution as much as it is a political institution. And it's fundamentally a culturally conservative one. Fair or not, many perceive Obama as a cultural outsider. This week, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley said of Obama's friendship with former left-wing domestic terrorist Bill Ayers: "They're friends. So what?"

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Perhaps the assumption that the Democrats should be favored is also the problem. Too much focus has been given to what is wrong with Republicans and not enough has focused on how badly the Democrats have done in the last two years. The Democrats were dead wrong on what to do about the problems with the war in Iraq. They voted some 60 times for retreat from a winning strategy. How dumb is that?

On the energy issue they are completely out of touch. The public wants to drill for domestic oil and gas and the Democrats want to continue to put idiotic restrictions on domestic production because of perceived environmental issues. The Democrats have been strangling all forms of energy for years and the voters have caught on to their scam to drive up prices to induce conservation which is their favorite energy policy. It is the high cost of energy that is doing the most damage to the economy which makes it hard for Democrats to blame Republicans.

On taxes the Democrats want to raise them even if it reduces revenues and hurts the economy and employment. There really is no good reason to vote for Democrats this year.