Jay Reding.com

Barack Obama had never run a competitive campaign in his life before 2008, certainly not on the scale of a presidential run. For the last few months, he seemed to have an almost unnatural ability at it.

In the last 72 hours, the Obama campaign has begun to implode, and at the worst possible time. It may not be enough to sink him, but it’s becoming an increasingly large possibility.

The way in which the Wright scandal is being mishandled is not helping Obama. Here’s what he said just a few weeks ago:

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions - the good and the bad - of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.

I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

Today, it’s a different story. It looks like Sen. Obama really can disown Rev. Wright. Not only that, it certainly seems like he did disown Rev. Wright.

Obama has a huge credibility problem right now. Rev. Wright was his pastor for 20 years. Rev. Wright officiated his marriage and baptized his children. And just now he finds out that Rev. Wright is a race-baiter? That all of a sudden Rev. Wright went from perfectly reasonable to abjectly bugnuts just as Obama was running for President. As Jim Geraghty puts it: you buy that? That kind of argument isn’t going to play with the American people, who have the common sense to spot when someone’s being a patent phony from a mile away.

Obama himself has said that Rev. Wright issue is a legitimate political issue. Obama himself has said that he could no more disown Wright than he could disown the entire black community. Obama himself said that he had no idea that Rev. Wright was this crazy, even though he attended his church for 20 years.

That kind of thing is what can kill a campaign. You can’t keep changing the story, and you can’t expect the American people to believe you when your explanations are so patently unrealistic. Obama has run a well-oiled campaign, but the fact that he’s a political neophyte is starting to show at the worst time for him.

It’s doubtful that Obama really didn’t know who Rev. Jeremiah Wright really was for 20 years. It would be hard not to notice such things. Obama barely dodged the Wright issue the first time, and now his self-inflicted wounds are even worse.

This won’t necessarily kill him in the primary, but it will in the general election. For all Sen. Obama’s great political talent, a presidential election is not the time to start learning the ropes. A defter hand at campaigning would not have made these basic mistakes, but Obama’s inexperience is showing. Either he was willing to ignore Wright’s racism or he’s an incredibly poor judge of character. Regardless of which is the truth, it reflects poorly on him, and since he admits it’s a legitimate issue for discussion, he has to live with the consequences.

UPDATE: The New York Times has a transcript of Obama’s remarks. I didn’t see the press conference live, but from the end it reads like Obama was getting snippy with the reporters. We’ve seen that before from Obama, and in a crisis the last thing that you want to do is alienate the press.

Karl Rove has an interesting column in Newsweek giving advice to Barack Obama. Perhaps knowing that Sen. Obama isn’t going to listen, Rove’s ideas are actually quite good.

Sen. Obama’s appeal is starting to wear, and the problem with that is that his whole campaign is predicated on his personal appeal. The Obama movement isn’t an “issues” movement, but a “personality” movement. With Rev. Wright continuing to make things difficult for Obama, Obama’s double-digit loss in Pennsylvania, and his subsequent inability to stay above the fray, Obama is facing a major inflection point in his campaign. The fact that polling is showing Clinton outperforming him in a battle with McCain doesn’t help much.

None of this is likely to sink him—the Democrats have by and large made their choice—but no matter what happens in the primaries Obama will face an uphill battle in the general election. He’s already established himself as a man of the Left, and despite his valiant efforts on Fox News Sunday this weekend, he’s going to have a hard time shaking that image.

Obama’s strategy to stay above the fray and run on a campaign of not being George W. Bush isn’t going to cut it. For one, he can’t stay above the fray because he will be attacked, and what the Clinton people are hitting him on is just a fraction of what he’ll face in the general election. This weekend he even said that the Wright issue is a legitimate issue for debate—which is odd since the McCain camp doesn’t seem to want to push the issue. Obama can’t fight Clinton and stay above the fray forever—not unless he wants to seem weak.

As for trying to turn John McCain into a clone of George W. Bush, good luck with that. The two issues where this is being done are issues that aren’t going to hurt McCain very much. On the war, the war doesn’t seem to be hurting McCain with anti-war Republicans. The constant “100 years of war” distortions from the left don’t help, especially since they’re take so far out of context. It’s going to be hard to call McCain a “warmonger” and the like when he has personally witnessed the horrors of war in a way that only a few have, and two of his sons are members of the U.S. military who have done tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. McCain can’t be pegged as “chickenhawk” or slurred as Bush was for lack of service—and if the Democrats try they’ll end up looking foolish.

The same holds true for taxes. Yes, McCain wants to extend the Bush tax cuts even though he wasn’t for them previously. That’s not inconsistent. There’s a huge difference between enacting a new tax cut and raising current taxes. The last thing that anyone should do in an economic downturn is take more money out of the people’s pockets. Obama would be foolish to argue for more taxes in a time when people are getting squeezed at the pump and the grocery store—and saying that he’d only tax the “rich” won’t cut it anymore. It’s amazing how people suddenly become “rich” for the government’s purposes when April 15 rolls around.

Obama needs to distinguish himself, and he isn’t doing it. His campaign based on the force of his personality will probably get him to the Democratic nomination, but it won’t carry him in the general. Rove notes that Obama is weak on the issues, has little record of accomplishment in the Senate, and needs a real record of working in a bipartisan fashion. Those are things you generally can’t build on the campaign trail.

Obama had a promising start as a new kind of candidate—and there was something to that formula. But as the campaign season wears on, he’s going to need something more. Sen. Obama would be wise to follow Rove’s advice (after all, if there’s one thing Karl Rove knows, it’s retail politics). It is highly unlikely that he will, given how deeply hated Rove is among the Democratic base, but if Obama wants to win the White House, he’s going to have to do better than winning over a plurality of Democrats.

Hillary Clinton is challenging Barack Obama to a series of one-on-one debates in Indiana, in the style of the Lincoln/Douglas debates in the 1850’s:

So here’s my proposal - I’m offering Senator Obama a chance to debate me one-on-one, no moderators.

Just the two of us going for 90 minutes asking and answering questions. We’ll set whatever rules seem fair. I think that it would give the people of Indiana, and I assume a few Americans might tune in because nearly 11 million watched the Philadelphia debate, and I think they would love seeing that kind of debate and discussion.

As much as it pains me to agree with Senator Clinton, that is a rather good idea. The moderated debate format is stale and insipid, and the result of these debates are generally candidates spouting the same canned responses that they do on the stump. It’s rare that a candidate says anything interesting—the risks are usually too great, and the moderates rarely push them far enough to get them to truly go off script.

A one-on-one debate allows the candidates to really clash with each other. It lets them demonstrate their real mastery of the issues and it ensures that just reciting the same canned answers won’t fly.

Of course, that’s why such a debate has a snowman’s chance in Hades of happening. No candidate is going to take that risk in today’s world of blogs and YouTube. Candidates live in perpetual fear of saying something in a debate that might turn into the next “macaca” or “global test” moment.

Sen. Obama has no real reason to want to take up Sen. Clinton’s challenge—he’s still the frontrunner, and his best move is to let the clock run out and ensure that Clinton doesn’t receive any additional momentum. Even though he’s the more rhetorically gifted of the two, the cost/benefit calculus to him just doesn’t add up.

Still, if we really want a debate that puts political candidates on notice, that would be the format to do that. We want political leaders that can think on their feet and respond to the harshest criticism. We want political leaders who can face a challenge. We want political leaders who can give us answers that haven’t been processed and focus-grouped and analyzed to death.

In fact, Sen. Clinton’s idea should be extended to the general election debates. Let Sen. McCain debate the Democratic nominee one-on-one, with no moderators. Let us drop the artificial rules and let the candidates challenge each other rather than speaking past each other. These people are auditioning to be the leader of the world’s preeminent superpower—the very least of their challenges will be their political opponent. If they can’t take the heat of an unmoderated debate, how can we ask them to take the heat of leading the nation?

Since losing Pennsylvania to Hillary, I hear Obama is so bitter that he’s started clinging to guns and religion…

Looks like the margin will be right around 10%—and more interestingly if you add together all the popular vote including Michigan and Florida, Hillary has the popular vote. Will the Democrats decide to have their superdelegates override the will of the majority of their electorate? Will they do so by disenfranchising two major states in the process?

The Democratic chattering classes are firmly in the bag for Obama, but what we’re seeing is that he truly hasn’t been able to “close the deal” and Democrats should think long and hard about that.

UPDATE: Here’s something interesting. The second Obama stopped his speech, his whole demeanor changed. He looked worried.

UPDATE: Jennifer Rubin notes that while Hillary Clinton’s speech was rather upbeat, Obama’s negative attacks against McCain made him sound angry and small. Sorry, Sen. Obama, but you haven’t won yet, no matter how badly you’d rather it were otherwise.

TalkLeft has some interesting criticisms about how Barack Obama is handling the press. Obama hasn’t held a press conference in 10 days, has limited his appearance to friendly outlets like The Daily Show, and snapped at a reporter who gave him a foreign-policy question at a Pennsylvania diner.

Senator Obama has never run a truly competitive campaign in his life, and while Hillary Clinton is hardly a model of transparency, John McCain certainly is. Even though the press is on Obama’s side, he can’t expect to dodge them forever—especially if he wins the nomination and has to face up against someone who knows how to work the press corps.

Democrats are taking a risk on a candidate who is likable, but untested. It’s their choice to make, but the kneejerk defenses of Obama aren’t exactly the way a party should vet a candidate for national office.