Pointed out by VDH:
...don't count on a Palin implosion: if one examines Obama's failed House race, and the weird pull-outs of both his primary and general election Illinois Senatorial opponents, then we sense that he has never really waged a knock-out campaign fight until this past year--and that may not be true of Palin's past scrappy and contested rise to the top.
Barack Obama is a hot house plant. He only beat Hillary! because of his early success in caucuses, and because of the Clinton campaign's early complacency and overconfidence. He lost the last half of the primary seasons.
He wasn't supposed to win the nomination this year--it was just a practice run. But now he's like a dog who chases cars, and has finally caught one. He doesn't know what to do with it.
It's still an unhill battle, given the increasingly naked partisanship of the news.
Notice, for example, now that Obama is losing and the press hasn't found the handle that can take down Palin, that political news is completely off the radar. Before, when Obama was up 10 points, he could sneeze and there'd be three front-page AP stories:
Obama sneeze heralds change in the wind
AP Analysis: Obama sneeze benefits women, minorities, tissue manufacturers
History in the making: first black President-almost-elect to sneeze on the campaign trail
Now...zip. It might as well be February for all the political stories we see. So what's up? What's up is they're frantically digging for a story line that will neutralize Palin and boost The One. Politics is in the deep freeze until the story line has been shaped right.
Is that a "Dark Knight" reference I spy? With Obama being compared to the Joker?
He wasn't supposed to win the nomination this year--it was just a practice run. But now he's like a dog who chases cars, and has finally caught one. He doesn't know what to do with it.
I don't know why more people don't see this.
To condense what I wrote shortly after your comment in the Commentary thread:
Obama's problem is that he shouldn't have been his party's candidate for president. He presents very well, but at his core he's not presidential material. The "superdelegate" system was put into place by the Democratic Party to prevent situations like this. Too bad it wasn't allowed to work.
He probably would have made a formidable vice-presidential candidate under Hillary, though, as long as the public didn't perceive the pair as too liberal. (But you're right -- each of them has a different set of negatives that could add up to defeat.)
I think the public is starting to recognize that an Obama presidency would not turn out well. At best, he would be "Jimmy Carter, but without the steely resolve." More likely he'd be ludicrously out of his depth -- he'd make a series of stupid, avoidable mistakes, and then blunder even worse in trying to talk his way out of them. Even worse would be the result of actually implementing many of his proposed policies.
Rand, you sly devil. Using racist code like "hot house plant"!
I mean, what plant comes to mind when you say "hot house plant"? Orchids, right? And if you asked the average American where orchids come from, they would say "Africa". [Actually, most of them would probably guess "South America", BUT if you mentioned orchids after bringing up Barack Hussein Obama, I think most of them would guess "Africa"!]
BBB
Rand, you sly devil. Using racist code like "hot house plant"!
Actually, if I had the time, I've been thinking about going through Palin's convention speech and deconstructing it to find all the racist code words and phrases...
Well, she talked about Alaska a lot, and what comes to mind when you say "Alaska?" Cold, right? And snow. What color is snow? Aha! Clearly she was talking about the white race's right to rule the world, and reduce the black man back to slavery.
And what about calling her husband's sport snowmachine racing? I mean, there's that word race right next to machine, as in Chicago machine politics, the origin of that, you know, fellow who doesn't look like any of those Presidents on dollar bills. A nasty slur on Bark's race and hometown, the big meany.
Obama Rocks!