In today’s Times of London, Gerard Baker takes the direct approach to election analysis:

There’s a popular view among Democrats and the media establishment that the reason for the party’s current disarray is that it just happens to have two most extraordinary candidates: talented, attractive, and in their gender and race, excitingly new. But there’s an alternative explanation, which I suspect the voters have grasped rather better than their necromancers in the media. Both are losers.

It’s hard to call either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton losers, frankly. But whether or not they’re closers remains to be seen. Baker points, I think rightly, to character as a potential Achilles’ heel for both Democrats.

On Obama:

He tells the mavens of San Francisco one thing and the great unwashed of Pennsylvania another. In defending his long relationship with the Rev Jeremiah Wright, he shopped his own grandmother, comparing the reverend’s views . . .to his grandmother’s occasionally expressed fears about the potential of being the victim of crime at the hands of an African-American.

On Hillary:

Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, has been busy shedding the final vestiges of shame and honesty in her desperate attempt to save her candidacy. She has abandoned any pretence of a message, and simply seized on every opening presented to her by her opponent. . . . It’s hard to know what’s worse – expressing condescending views about the working class or pretending to be one of them.

Baker pronounces: “The Democratic campaign is simply disappearing in the enveloping vapidity of the candidates’ making.” Vapid–yes. But disappearing? Not hardly. This fight isn’t ending anytime soon.