BUYER’S remorse was starting to afflict Barack Obama supporters before Tuesday’s returns showed he’d delivered a knockout punch to Hillary Clinton. The young orator who had seemed so fantastic beginning with his ’07 Iowa Jefferson-Jackson speech disappointed even his own advisers over the last two weeks. Old party hands mourned that they’re stuck with a flawed candidate.
The whipping Obama gave Clinton in North Carolina and his near miss in Indiana transformed that impression. The candidate who delivered the victory speech in Raleigh, NC, was the Obama of Des Moines, bearing no resemblance to the gloomy, uneasy candidate who’d seemed unable to effectively deal with bumps in the campaign road. Returning to his eloquent call for unity, Obama in advance dismissed Republican criticism of his ideology or his past as the same old partisan bickering that the people hate.
John McCain doesn’t like that kind of campaigning, either. But a gentlemanly contest probably would guarantee a Democratic White House takeover.
Republicans were cheered and Democrats distressed by an inexperienced Obama’s ineptitude in adversity the last month. The new GOP consensus deemed Obama the weaker of the two Democrats.
Indeed, Clinton’s failure Tuesday was a product of demographics rather than Obama’s campaign skill. Consistently winning over 90 percent of the African-American vote, Obama is unbeatable in a primary where the black electorate is as large as North Carolina’s (half the registered Democratic vote). Indiana differed from seemingly similar Ohio and Pennsylvania, where Clinton scored big wins, because it borders Obama’s state of Illinois, with many voters in the Chicago media market.
As the clear winner and presumptive nominee, Obama Tuesday unveiled his general-election strategy. Dismissing McCain’s “ideas” as “nothing more than the failed policies of the past,” he denounced what he called the GOP campaign plan: “Yes, we know what’s coming . . . We’ve already seen it, the same names and labels they always pin on everyone who doesn’t agree with all their ideas.”
Thus, Obama seems to be ruling out not only discussion of his 20-year association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright but also any identification of him as “liberal” or an advocate of higher taxes, higher domestic spending, abortion rights and gun control. These issues appear to be included in what Obama called “attempts to play on our fears and exploit our differences.”
The test of this strategy may be his friendship with and support from William Ayers, an unrepentant member of the Weatherman terrorist underground of the 1960s. Instead of totally disavowing Ayers as he belatedly did his former pastor Wright, Obama potentially deepened his problem by referring to Ayers as just a college professor – “a guy who lives in my neighborhood.” He then compared their relationship with his friendship with conservative Republican Sen. Tom Coburn, as he had compared Wright’s racism with his white grandmother’s.
Democrats abhor bringing up what Obama calls Ayers’ “detestable acts 40 years ago,” but it’ll be brought into the public arena even if it isn’t McCain’s style. A 2001 photo of Ayers stomping on the American flag has been all over the Internet this week. That was the year Obama accepted a $200 contribution from Ayers and the year in which the former Weatherman said: “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.”
McCain will demand no response from Obama, but others will. How the prospective nominee handles this in the future will help define whether he’s seen as flawed or fantastic in the long campaign ahead.