One of the downsides of living in the bubble of the MSM and the warm embrace of most of the punditocracy is that you think everyone buys what you are selling, or at the very least is too polite to mention that you are making a fool of yourself. When the McCain camp called Barack Obama out for playing the race card, I imagine the Obama camp was stunned. But by the end of the day on Thursday it became apparent that Obama’s gambit was failing, and creating far more problems than the Obama team anticipated.
Obama’s Bill Burton tried to take back the race card. (But whoops– not in sufficient time to prevent the New York Times from looking foolish. Yes, yes you have to get up very early in the day to do that.) When The New Republic calls Obama’s move a “blunder” and the Hardball panel unanimously calls out Obama, it’s time to fold your hand.
What lasting impact, if any, does this have? Well for starters I think Obama will stop overtly playing the racial victim. And that frankly is likely a good thing for him since few voters in the undecided camp are going to be swayed by that sort of thing. (The opposite is more likely.)
But the more lasting impact is the sense that one by one the lofty premises of the Obama campaign are crumbling. New Politics? He dumped public financing and shifted on a dozen issues. Post-racial? Reverend Wright and now amateurish race baiting. (Victor Davis Hanson dissects the utter message confusion on this score here.) A new era in international relations? An embarrassing overreach in Berlin.
Why isn’t it working? What’s wrong? You can imagine Hillary Clinton and her supporters banging their heads on their desks and emailing one another (“We told them!” “No one believed us!”) Time it appears has not been Obama’s friend. It has given more and more people time to think and discover that there may not be much behind the grand rhetoric. Others have figured out the degree to which Obama has concealed, evaded and fudged in setting out his political views. What does he believe? It’s unnerving to know so little and to realize he is perhaps the least forthright candidate in recent memory. And, of course, The Ego has just grown and grown so not even the MSM can ignore it. A smart Jonathan Chait has figured out that if the election is about Obama he loses. (Wow. From savior to drag on the Democratic brand in six months.)
But McCain supporters shouldn’t get their hopes up quite yet. Obama is adaptable if nothing else. And he is entirely capable of navigating back to bread-and- butter issues and effectively tying McCain to the Bush administration. Whether he can pour the old wine into new bottles — that is, find forums and language that are appropriately proportioned and are not open to ridicule –is what remains to be seen.
When you’ve been creating a “movement” that morphed into a cult, it is hard to dial it back. But if he does and gets back to talking about something other than himself, it is still his election to lose. It is remarkable, though, stunning really, that there is some possibility that he might do just that.
