Obama Musings: Why The Only Question Is What His Margin of Victory Will Be

Even with the election three and a half months out, it's pretty much a foregone conclusion that Barack Obama will be the next president.

This is not a particularly rash prediction given that color-blind Democrats and Independents and even some Republicans will far outnumber people who would never vote for an African-American, Obama has an enthusiastic base and will attract a broad cross-section of voters, is pretty much in tune with the mainstream on the issues that matter, has long coattails and is incredibly well organized and financed.

In contrast, John McCain has a small and unenthusiastic base, is running a lackadaisical campaign more focused on raising money than winning votes, has trouble figuring out where he stands on the issues that matter, has no coattails and is stuck with an albatross known as George Bush, whose unpopularity he wears like a bad case of five o'clock shadow.

The only question is whether Obama will squeak by or win in a walk, and I believe the margin will have a lot to do with how successful he is at defining who John McCain is.

This notion runs against the political grain, but then the media has been deaf and dumb to a lot of what's really going on since well before it was blindsided by the Obama phenomenon in Iowa. Entire forests have been pulped to print commentaries about who Obama is, what he stands for, whether he walks on water and whether he has a genuine birth certificate.

Obama, in fact, is pretty much an open book, while it is McCain who is emerging as a mystery man. It is for this reason that Obama cannot be content to merely let McCain fall on his own sword, which he will continue to do and do with greater frequency when debate season commences.

Obama has to aim right through the White House for McCain's wheelhouse, and that will take some dexterity. McCain's Vietnam War experience has little bearing on whether he is presidential timber, but in any event is off limits. So are McCain's history as a misogynist and his septuagenarian discombobulations.

Fair game are McCain's voodoo economic and health care plans, as well as his views on Social Security and women's reproductive rights. But the more Obama hammers McCain about that five o'clock shadow -- and smokes out how hard wired McCcin is to the presidential failures of the last seven-plus years and how incredibly un-maverick he really is -- the wider his margin of victory could be.

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Speaking of race, the No Shit Story of the month is the much chattered over New York Times article last week that solemnly declared Obama is not closing the racial gap in America.

I have given no thought as to whether McCain is closing the Luddite gap, while it never occurred to me, as it most certainly and absurdly did The Times, that Obama would bridge racial fault lines a couple of centuries in the making by his mere presence on the national stage.

The Times story is additionally problematic because it reduces the most exciting presidential campaign of my lifetime to a single issue. While race matters to knuckledraggers, it is a non-starter for a healthy majority of American voters who will proudly elect a man whose mother was a white woman from Kansas and father a black man from Kenya.

As it is, I believe in my head and heart that we are an election cycle or two away from a time when race and sexual preference simply won't be of particular consequence to a candidate's viability. Racists and homophobes are dying breeds, and while they will never become extinct, they will be even a minority in the ossified Republican Party of the near future.

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Obama needs to stop flapping his gums about the less than respectful coverage that his wife is getting in the right-wing media. It is unnecessarily distracting.

There was a time when a candidate's wife was little more than wallpaper, but as Rosalynn Carter, Nancy Reagan, Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush and Cindy McCain and Michelle Obama herself have shown, they are their husband's leading surrogates.

That doesn't justify scurrilous and otherwise unfair attacks on the candidates' wives, but they are fair game.

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Despite generally fawning media coverage, McCain can't seem to catch a break and doesn't deserve to. After badmouthing Obama for weeks over not visiting Iraq or Afghanistan, the presumptive Democratic nominee is doing just that. He moves on to Jordan today and then Israel, the Palestinian territories, Germany, France and England.

It is well nigh ironic that the man who McCain says is sorely lacking in foreign policy experience has long recognized Afghanistan as the central front in the War on Terror even if Bush insists that the terrorists who wrecked havoc on 9/11 were from Iraq, which of course has been the central distraction in the War on Terror. McCain has been smart enough to not repeat that canard, but has been dumb and dumber in repeatedly declaring victory but adamantly refusing to address any kind of troop withdrawal timetable.

The chaos in Afghanistan has forced Bush and McCain to sidle up to Obama's position like a pair of hapless fools who have been thrown out of a party and are gingerly making their way along the narrow ledge of a tall building high above the street in an attempt to find a window get back in. It would be comical if it wasn't so bloody sad.

To their additional discomfort, Obama and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki are more or less on the same page about U.S. troop withdrawals. Al-Maliki's insistence that Iraq's national sovereignty be recognized has forced the man in the White House to do some shape shifting and provoked his wannabe successor to issue the second most asinine statement of the week past -- that Bush and Obama are a lot closer on Iraq than he is. (The first is that the toxic Phil Gramm really has been expelled from the campaign.)

Let's be clear: This doesn't mean that Obama is a great national security sage. He is not, but he does have foresight, a hallmark of all great leaders.

And while McCain suffered mightily in a North Vietnamese POW camp while Bush was back home playing Air National Guard flyboy when not partying, they don't even have hindsight let alone foresight: Neither have learned the lessons from that unhappy war that have had to be learned all over again in Iraq.

Expectations for Obama's overseas trip are ridiculously high considering that it is primarily a meet and greet.

But in yet another slap to McCain, we will be constantly reminded throughout the week that if people in Europe could vote in the presidential election, the hugely popular Obama would win in a landslide over McCain, who is accurately viewed as an older but not wiser version of the most reviled man in the world who doesn't live in a cave and wear a white turban and a beard.

Photograph by Pablo Martinez Monsivais/The Associated Press