Obama & The Summer Of Our Discontent

For Barack Obama supporters, this is the summer of our discontent. While John McCain flails, Obama does a victory lap around Europe and comes home to a tanking economy and two unpopular wars, but his lead in most polls is miniscule, he is behind in one and has lost ground in a few key states. What's going on?

After cogitating hard on this seeming paradox while spending much of the weekend off of my feet because of a big back attack -- as in floating in a refreshingly cool pool and laying on a chaise lounge with a copy of John O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra at hand -- I concluded that:

* It's mid summer and few voters are giving the campaign the attention that the punditocracy is. That will change after Labor Day.

* Obama's skin color, relative inexperience and questions about who he really is continue to be a drag on his candidacy.

Let's further note that as a well-known war hero who has been in the public eye for decades, McCain should be kicking Obama's ass in the polls, but his numbers are pretty much stagnant and have not moved appreciably as a result of a series of highly publicized smears, including playing not just the race card but the fricking arugula card.

So while voters aren't going ga-ga over Obama, they certainly aren't flocking to the septuagenarian sour puss.

McCain is trying hard to change the subject from the economy and those wars to Obama himself. It is incumbent on Obama to change the subject back, but campaign insiders say that he is loath to do much more than say that he's "disappointed" over the ontime happy warrior's personal attacks and will go after him hammer and tong following the conventions.

There is an old political adage that candidates are best defined over the summer by their opponents and not in the fall, and that certainly was true of that tax-and-spend Walter Mondale in 1984, rapist coddling Michael Dukakis in 1988 and wind-surfing girlie man John Kerry in 2004. August was the cruelest month for all of those Democrats, so why should the here and now be any different?

Because 2008 is not 1984, 1988 or 2004.

Race and other concerns over Obama aside, voters will understand that the McCain campaign's red-herring obsessions with their opponent's celebrity, gym regimen and fondness for exotic salad greens and protein bars is not what the future of America is about.

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I had another thought while chilling over the weekend: When is the last time you heard or read fresh thinking from a conservative who worships at the Republican altar?

The answer, of course, is that it's been a very long time unless you find Patrick Buchanan or Grover Norquist to be fresh thinkers. The reason, of course, is that George Bush and his band of merry neocon pranksters have bankrupted the brand and there's nothing new in the dry well of GOP conservatism for McCain to draw from.

This doesn't mean that they aren't fresh conservative ideas out there. There are plenty, although the Buchanans and Norquists are trying their best to drown them out and McCain wouldn't know what to do with them if they smacked him on his sour puss.

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Obama has decided to forgo McCain's proposal that they participate in town hall-format debates and instead there apparently only will be three old-style presidential debates and one vice presidential debate.

The excuse given by the Obama campaign is that there wasn't enough time to fit in town hall debates given how late the conventions are, but that's lame.

There is no better opportunity for Obama to score points than when he goes one-on-one with McCain even if he is too thin compared to his paunchy opponent, and town hall debates during the primary season were an invigorating change of pace.

How extraordinary that Obama, who claims incessantly to be the innovator, defaults to the same old same old.

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You could practically hear the bodies of tree huggers hitting the sea after jumping lemming-like from the nearest high cliff when Obama announced that he was now backing a limited repeal of the congressional moratorium on offshore oil drilling.

There was a certain hilarity in the cries of "flip flopper!" and "panderer!" because this crowd still doesn't understand that Obama has been far less of a progressive than others keep portraying him.

What is not so funny is that we have had to endure nearly eight years of a president who has been categorically unable to change his mind about anything no matter how foul or screwed up it may be. Obama gets my vote (okay, he already was getting it) for not being afraid to embrace a different environmental and energy policy position so long as it has safeguards.

That so noted, his calls for dipping into the strategic petroleum reserve and a windfall profits tax on oil companies are pandering and dumb ideas at that, although his new TV ad linking McCain to Big Oil is welcome and his energy plan in the aggregate is focused in the right areas. That would be alternative energy development and not merely expanding drilling opportunities for big political contributors that will have a modest payoff in a decade or so.

Photograph by Jae C. Hong/The Associated Press