It is supposed to be the Democrats’ year. John McCain is George W. Bush’s clone, they tell us. The incumbent party can’t possibly hold the White House when over 80% of voters think we are on the wrong track, they inform us.

Yet there seems to be an outbreak of nervousness, if not second-guessing over Barack Obama’s nomination. Paul Krugman muses that “the nightmare Mr. Obama and his supporters should fear is that in an election year in which everything favors the Democrats, he will nonetheless manage to lose.” Others fret that Obama really doesn’t have the “A” foreign policy team. And will Hillary Clinton be the Al Gore of 2008 –the popular vote winner whose mere presence suggests the “real” winner is less than legitimate?

There is, it seems, a world of difference between a “generic” Democrat and the one they have settled on. The degree of risk which the Democrats have undertaken by selecting an extremely lightly experienced, ultra-liberal and demographically-challenged (h/t Instapundit) candidate is beginning to hit home. Had the Democrats managed to come up with an experienced, middle-of-the-road Democrat (e.g. Mark Warner or Evan Bayh) wouldn’t the polls look a whole lot closer to those generic Democrat vs. Republican numbers?

It may be that the Democrats stumbled into the weakest choice and the Republicans the strongest in terms of electability. Still, it will be a marvel of electoral incompetence if the Democrats manage to fritter away their advantages.