Posted by
Andrews on Monday, April 14, 2008 7:11:30 PM
I have been
speaking recently about how Obama is painting himself into a corner, by refusing to fully respond to the Reverend Wright controversy, by falling back on the tired old rhetoric of racial injustice to try to excuse Wright's comments, and by his recent statement reminiscent of Howard Dean's "guns, gays and G-d", not to mention his rather pathetic defense of the same as being "poorly worded".
But it seems that Obama is in full fledged meltdown mode, and can't stop himself. Rather than simply ignore McCain's criticism of his statement, which would have been the best defense in this case (as he is not yet running against McCain), he came back trying to paint McCain as a Bush lackey. Not only does this fail to answer the charges, it paints Obama as a run of the mill Democrat politician. In the same way as his retreat to "racist Amerikka" in "the speech" painted him as just another racial grievance politician, this makes him sound slike just another partisan Democrat trying to run against Bush.
It definitely does nothing to win back his early reputation of being "a different kind of politician".
Beyond that, his flailing about, calling Hillary Clinton "Annie Oakley", just reeks of desperation. Especially following on her very effective mockery of his beer drinking and bowling. It is not quite Dukakis in the tank, but it is clearly getting to the "Kerry on a windsurfer" bad photo op level. And Obama is just not responding well. Where in the past he would have laughed it off, or made some sort of self-deprecating quip, he appears to have los this cool and is lashing out at Hillary. Yes, he is still doing ti with his little smile, and he still sounds casual as ever, but the words give lie to the visual cues. He sounds like a man who does not know what to do, as if the Wright incident and the failure of "the speech" has left him unsure of himself, without any clue what he can do to recover.
I never thought I would say this, but Hillary is proving to be the better politician.