Marshmallow Clouds, Puffy Rainbows, and Unicorns

Well, the Obaminator has chosen Joe Biden to be his running mate and, as I see it from here, the wheels continue to come off the Obama campaign. The once robust coalition of marshmallow clouds, puffy rainbows, and unicorns is starting wear a little thin. At least around here.

I continue to believe that the election is going to be a blowout in McCain’s favor — well over forty states. Now I am not making this prediction as someone utterly disinterested. While I have no desire to see John McCain as the next president of the United States, I do have a sincere and enthusiastic desire to see Obama lose. And so, someone might ask me, does this not mean that any amateur punditry that you are engaged in, to the effect that Obama is doing to get his clock cleaned, may be mere wish-fulfillment punditry? No, not really. If we are going to be subjected to four years of Obama, I want to face up to the bad news asap, the better to enable us to hide the family silver in time.

So here are a few of the basic reasons why I think this is going to be a lopsided election — and not a hanging chad squeaker like we had with both Gore and Kerry.

1. The pretentiousness of Obama only worked until it became risible. But it has now officially become risible, and the McCain camp has been effectively attacking it as nothing more than a cheap knock-off messianism. That labeling has already been effectively accomplished. It has already stuck, and Obama is only a step or two away from becoming a laughingstock. One or two gaffes should do it, and Obama away from the teleprompter (and Biden at any time) are certainly up to the challenge.

2. To the extent that there was substance to Obama’s call for “change,” it depended on Obama’s status as the Innocent One coming from Outside the Beltway. And the test case for his Innocence was his lonely vote against the war in Iraq. But now, with the selection of Insider Joe for VP, and Fightin’ Joe’s vote for the war, that issue is clean gone. Not only is the issue clean gone, it is gone because it was publicly conceded.

3. The Democrats are genuinely divided, and the patched up party unity that we will be shown this week at the convention will not calm down quite a few of Hillary’s supporters, who will remain hopping mad. A number of them (up to 20 percent perhaps) will vote for McCain, while others will go in the direction of splinter parties on the left.

4. Obama’s strange liasons will continue to haunt him. His connection to William Ayers is mind-boggling — just imagine if McCain had paid a few social, chatty visits to Timothy McVeigh, and had worked together with him on a few projects. The fact that Obama is not having his feet held to the fire on this by the mainstream media creates the optical illusion for them that the voting public does not have access to YouTube clips that do make the connection. In other words, there is a general awareness now that Obama really is a hard leftist. As in, for all intents and purposes, he’s a radical, a commie.

5. Racism is not the problem in America that it once was, but it has not gone away. What has gone away is a willingness on the part of whites to speak in a racially-charged way in public. Everybody knows how they are supposed to talk, and so that is how they do talk to the pollsters. How quickly race surfaced as an issue in the Democratic primaries is testimony to this reality. Now for many of those for whom race is an issue, it would not necessarily be an issue if the black candiate were far more conservative. But for all the posturing, Obama is not a post-racial candiate at all (think Jeremiah Wright), and this gives nervous white voters the only push they need to let race matter.

6. Given the bungling of the Bush administration, and the state of the economy, the Democratic candidate should be so far ahead in the polls that staffers at the RNC should be leaving suicide notes on their desks by now. But eerily, that is not even close to happening.

7. Obama’s advisors appear to have a tin ear for what sells in America. Take that European tour for example. Whoever thought that to have Obama declare himself a “citizen of the world” to a crowd of adoring and cheering Europeans would have any effect other than to make the American electorate go, “Uh oh”?

8. Speaking of a tin ear, whose idea was it to make a big deal out of McCain not knowing how many houses he owns? All McCain has to do is say that he bought however many houses he has honestly, and not in cahoots with a Chicago slumlord, the way some folks buys their houses. The issue here is not the houses, but rather the competence of the Obama staff — why do they make the erratic choices that they have consistently made?

But of course, my lack of enthusiasm for McCain has to be given its due. He could snatch defeat from the jaws of victory at any time by showing us one of his erratic maverick moves. If he does that — by, for example, choosing Hillary as his VP — and I change my mind about the election, I will post my thoughts on that subject here. And I will try to remember to entitle that post “Eating Crow.” But right now, it still looks to me like Obama is going to pull a McGovern or Dukakis.