Catching A Clue

I've often heard MSM types and other assorted Democrats lament that they cannot understand how the presidential race could be so close. After all, they have such an "appealing" candidate. The answer is, of course, that their candidate really isn't that appealing at all, but they choose to believe otherwise. It's like a mother who repeatedly tells her gangly misshapen son that he is not a horrifying freak, but is instead really "handsome." After awhile maybe even she believes it.

Christopher Hitchens is not Obama's mother: Is Obama Another Dukakis?

Why is Obama so vapid and hesitant and gutless? Why, to put it another way, does he risk going into political history as a dusky Dukakis? Well, after the self-imposed Jeremiah Wright nightmare, he can't afford any more militancy, or militant-sounding stuff, even if it might be justified. His other problems are self-inflicted or party-inflicted as well. He couldn't have picked a gifted Democratic woman as his running mate, because he couldn't have chosen a female who wasn't the ever-present Sen. Clinton, and so he handed the free gift of doing so to his Republican opponent (whose own choice has set up a screech from the liberals like nothing I have heard since the nomination of Clarence Thomas). So the unquantifiable yet important "atmospherics" of politics, with all their little X factors, belong at present to the other team.

The Dukakis comparison is, of course, a cruel one, but it raises a couple more questions that must be faced. We are told by outraged Democrats that many voters still believe, thanks to some smear job, that Sen. Obama is a Muslim. Yet who is the most famous source of this supposedly appalling libel (as if an American candidate cannot be of any religion or none)? Absent any anonymous whispering campaign, the person who did most to insinuate the idea in public—"There is nothing to base that on. As far as I know"—was Obama's fellow Democrat and the junior senator from New York. It was much the same in 1988, when Al Gore brought up the Dukakis furlough program, later to be made infamous by the name Willie Horton, against the hapless governor of Massachusetts who was then his rival for the nomination.

I see where Hitchens is going here, but he misses the more obvious point by getting bogged down in the fine details of campaign strategy. This question isn't "Why is Obama so vapid, hesitant and gutless?" The question is "Why would the Democrats pick someone who is so obviously vapid, hesitant and gutless?"

It is also a more interesting question.