Jay Reding.com

When I read that Barack Obama was going to give his speech from a faux Greek temple I thought it was a joke.

Apparently it’s really true.

After Obama’s Berlin speech, his numbers went down. Obama is overexposed, and turning his nomination speech into a kind of coronation is the exact sort of thing that has been causing Obama to hemorrhage support for the last few weeks. People don’t want to turn their politicians into secular messiahs—and that’s exactly what the Obama campaign has been trying to do.

The McCain camp is saying that Obama will get a 15 point bounce from the convention—trying to set expectations to unlikely highs. At this rate, I’m not so sure that Obama will get any bounce at all. He’s already got adulatory coverage for months on end—what more can he get from the media? When you’re already the media’s darling and MSNBC is at outreach of your campaign, there’s nowhere to go but down.

Obama will probably get some bump, but it won’t be 15 points, and it may not last long. I don’t see the Hillary supporters coming home this time, even with Hillary’s tepid praise for Obama last night.

Pride goes before a fall. Given the stratospheric heights to which Obama has been lofted, he should be more circumspect about how he runs his campaign. He wants to be the next Jack Kennedy—but he could end up an Adlai Stevenson.

UPDATE: After watching this video of the set, it looks like Sen. Obama is invoking the Markets of Trajan rather than a Greek temple. Then again, Trajan had military and executive experience, while Obama most assuredly has neither.

The word on the street is that Sen. Joe Biden will be Obama’s VP selection. The rumor mill states that Biden has already been assigned a Secret Service detail, and Gov. Kaine and Sen. Bayh have been informed that they will not be the pick.

Biden has some qualities that make him a good pick, but not enough to make up for his infamous lack of inner monologue. His tendency to put foot firmly in mouth is not something that makes him condusive to being a running mate to a neophyte politician.

Biden is a Washington insider, which goes against Obama’s message of change. He is someone who offers experience, but at a price. Of all the top contenders for Obama’s VP, he is perhaps one of the weakest.

Biden makes sense on a superficial level, but when it comes to who best complements Obama, he’s not the best choice that could be made.

On the other hand, it could be worse: Obama could have picked Clinton.

UPDATE: It’s official, Biden is it. At least the Obama people had the good sense to drop the bad news on the weekend.

The latest Zogby Poll has some interesting shifts in the race. Now, to be fair, Zogby’s polls are not that reliable and it is early in the race, but the poll does fit with other polls showing a softening of the race between McCain and Obama. On average, Obama is ahead, but not nearly as far ahead as he should be.

The conventional narrative is that the GOP brand is in the toilet, McCain is not an attractive candidate, and voters are hungry for “change.” The Democratic base is energized and the Republican base is demoralized. By all accounts, Obama should be beating McCain like a rented mule.

David Brooks hazards an answer: voters don’t know who Obama really is. It’s an interesting theory: Obama has a personal narrative, but it’s a postmodern one. As Brooks mentions, it’s as though he’s been grooming himself for higher office, but not ever really doing the things that are truly necessary. His lack of real experience and his stratospheric rise are connected and prevent him from either gaining or losing too much.

The Huntington Post has a piece that also asks whether Obama’s lack of substance is his Achilles Heel:

Despite the McCain campaign’s effectiveness, however, the best campaign against Barack Obama is not being run by his opponent, but by Barack Obama. It is Obama’s campaign that presents their candidate as an ever-changing work-in-progress. It is his own campaign that occludes our ability to know this man, depicting him as authentic as a pair of designer jeans.

Both analyses hit on something important: Obama is an unknown quantity. During the primaries he ran to the left of Hillary Clinton. Now, understandably, he’s run to the right. With McCain, voters know what they’re getting: he’s shifted his views somewhat (as all politicians do), but he’s done nothing like Obama’s pivots on public financing, FISA, offshore drilling, etc. A careful politician knows how to pivot without flip-flopping. For all of Obama’s personal magnetism, he’s not an experienced candidate.

Surprisingly, I agree with the Huffington Post article. Obama’s campaign is the best packaged and marketed campaign in modern political history. That is also it’s major flaw. The Obama team is in the process of building hype, but pure hype can’t improve a product. The iPhone was hyped, but largely delivered. Snakes on a Plane was the coolest thing ever until it actually came out and people realized it was as horrid as the title made it sound. Right now, the Obama campaign is closer to Snakes on a Plane than the iPhone.

McCain is the anti-candidate. In the end, his model works. Obama will clean up with young voters, liberals, and minorities. But that isn’t enough to win an election, not in an increasingly older country with independent voters who are up for grabs.

Obama has run a fascinating campaign that is well worthy of study and analysis—yet it is definitely underperforming. It isn’t the hype machine, the organization, or the technology that is failing to deliver, but a lack of real substance. Obama can continue to run the campaign he has, but it is the candidate and not the campaign that is causing the problems.

The New Yorker has given both Senators Obama and McCain something to agree on: their latest cover showing a turban-clad Obama and his wife brandishing an AK-47 is simply tasteless.

The cover is supposed to be a reflection on the supposed “right-wing smear machine” that the left loves to invent, but ends up being a case of friendly fire from the left wing. Its crude stereotype of both Obama and those with legitimate questions about his choice of associations manages to be offensive on a bipartisan level.

It is ironic that the ones that have been using the “fear tactics” that The New Yorker decries are not from the right. Sen. McCain treats Sen. Obama as He Who Must Not Be Middle-Named lest anyone accuse him of racism. The money spent by GOP-leaning 527 groups is a pittance compared to what is spent by groups like MoveOn.org, and the truly harsh attacks against Obama tended to come not from the “vast right-wing conspiracy” but from the paranoid mind of Sen. Clinton—who ironically enough invented the idea. Sen. Obama constantly lashes out against a “smear machine” which exists largely in the minds of the Senator and his supporters.

If Obama were smart, he would embrace his heritage and defuse the “Muslim” issue. The more he runs, the more he looks like he has something to hide. It seems unlikely that people who won’t vote for a candidate with a Muslim middle name are numerous enough to matter or sufficiently likely to vote for Sen. Obama to be bothered with. Obama should run on who he is—someone who is multicultural and can reach out to the rest of the world. The political costs of such a move are unlikely to hurt him, and the potential benefits are substantial. Why not proudly announce that he is Barack Hussein Obama, the son of a Kenyan Muslim who is a committed Christian and American, just as many Americans of foreign descent are? To hear him boldly proclaim his heritage defuses the issue and lets the political debate refocus on what matters—not false issues of patriotism, but substantive questions of judgement, integrity, and experience.

Steven Greenhut has an excellent editorial on what the GOP needs to do to recapture the credibility they’ve hemorrhaged over the last few years. The message is one that the GOP should take to heart: voters want something to vote for. Obama’s empty “change” message is resonating, and the GOP has to offer substantive change in response.

For example, he offers this message on taxes:

You pay plenty in taxes already. It’s not just about the cash, but about freedom. You need to invest in your business, pay your mortgage and pay for your kids’ education. Government already has too much money, and it spends it on mission-creep rather than the ‘public good.’ By the way, we are NOT going to increase taxes on your grandchildren by engaging in reckless debt spending, either.

That is the sort of message that the GOP needs to be sending. Confidence in government is at an all-time low—the Democratic argument that government is fundamentally broken, so let’s have more of it should be a non-starter. Obama’s great personal magnetism betrays yet another out-of-touch liberal.

But if the Republicans think that calling a spade a spade will win them the election, they’re dead wrong. Sticking Obama with the “liberal” label—even if richly deserved and completely accurate—is not going to be enough to swing the election. The GOP needs to have a real agenda.

Even though conservatives are balking at Sen. McCain’s efforts to speak out on global warming—and for good reason—at least he’s trying to set the agenda. The Lexington Project is the sort of forward-looking strategy that voters are looking for. The GOP needs to be a party of ideas, and the party leadership has to realize that calling the other guys names won’t work for them any more than it worked for the Democrats in 2002 and 2004. We need not only to say that we have conservative values, but make conservative values relevant to the American voter.

Why is a market approach better for health care? Because, as Mr. Greenhut explains, markets lower costs and make goods and services more available. But that isn’t enough, even though it’s true. What the GOP has always had a problem doing is taking those facts and turning them into a narrative. A market is an abstract concept… people respond to things that are within their own experience. The right narrative is that market-driven health care is like going to the neighborhood grocery store while government-run health care is like standing in a bread line. While that’s a rough analogy, it’s effective.

In a fair world, being a staunch conservative would be enough to win a Presidential election. This world isn’t fair, and politics is especially unfair. It is not enough to parade one’s conservative bona fides and call the other guy a liberal extremist. The way to win an election is to play, as Mr Greenhut puts it, to the “politics of aspiration.” For all the talk of the greatness of Ronald Reagan, the GOP seems to be having a tough time capturing the spirit of American optimism that motivated his campaign.

There is one thing that Mr. Greenhut is wrong about, though. This country shouldn’t be punished for the GOP’s transgressions. An Obama administration would be an unmitigated disaster for this nation. We don’t need another radical Supreme Court justice putting their whims above the rule of law. We don’t need higher taxes during an economic downturn. We can’t have radicals further using the machinery of the administrative state to reduce our freedoms even more. That doesn’t even touch on issues of free trade, energy policy, and other critical matters.

The GOP needs to get its act together. Years of fiscal irresponsibility and institutional incompetence have taken their toll on the Republican Party. The stakes in this election are too high not to embrace an agenda of substantive change. The GOP needs to not only stand on its values, but make those values accessible to those who don’t yet share them.

The GOP can win on the “politics of aspiration”—so long as they aspire to something higher than just skating by.

Arthur Silber notices that the fawning adoration of Barack Obama is starting to get a little creepy. In fact, it’s getting downright creepy.

Now, I don’t think that Sen. Obama is the sort of type who will have his followers marching through Poland any time soon—but this kind of unthinking devotion to a candidate does not belong in a democratic system. The politics of personality is inherently anti-democratic as it puts the value of the leader above the value of the people.

It’s hardly unusual to see a candidate inspire their partisans—that’s what a good politician does. What is so unusual about Obama is the level of fervor that surrounds him. He is treated like a rock star in a way that even Clinton was not. The Obama campaign is less a traditional campaign that it is a movement. Political campaigns are, or at least should be, about ideals. The Obama movement is about nothing deeper than some vague vision of “change”—a value that could mean everything from marching through Poland to changing the national anthem to “Kumbaya” and inviting Osama bin Laden to a nationwide love-in. “Change” is an empty slogan, the intellectual equivalent of junk food—filling, but never offering anything of substance.

And if it were just about “change” there’s no reason to suspect that Obama would be ahead. Every candidate in this race talked about change. The real force behind the Obama campaign is not mere change, but force of personality. That is what gives Obama his political power, but it is also what makes him such a troubling force. We don’t need more uncritical worship of political figures in society, we need more individualism and vibrancy.

It’s as though Obama supporters have woken up with Brain Slugs attached to them. Instead of thinking rationally about the candidate, we have people people adopting his middle name on Facebook

. Instead of rationalizing one’s political choices, we have a bandwagon effect on a nightmare scale.

So what’s the problem? A few people have a political crush? It cuts deeper than that. Those who put their trust in politicians are quickly crushed—and make no mistake, Obama is nothing more than a typical politician when all the rhetoric is put aside. Just witness his contortions on gun control, and his change of heart on telecom immunity. Like any politician, he will say what needs to be said to get elected, and he is doing exactly what a jaded Washington insider would do—which is hardly change one can believe in. When his followers learn that he’s just another pol, all that energy and enthusiasm will quickly fade away and be replaced by even greater apathy—political movements based on personality typically do not last long.

Of course, the other alternative is more troubling. People who need a Leader tend not to be thinking all that rationally. At the risk of breaking Godwin’s Law yet again, even if Sen. Obama is far removed from the sort that would have people burning books, a cult of personality is not compatible with democracy. Not only that, but we’re already getting some disturbing indications of a mob mentality.

One should never put one’s trust in the political class. On one end it breeds disappointment, on the other zealotry. The Obama movement is the first real mass organized political movement of the 21st Century, and if it is the model for those to follow, American democracy may not emerge intact. It won’t be Obama who leads us there, but his little cult of personality is putting us down that path.

The AP is reporting that Sen. Barack Obama has the delegates to be the Democratic nominee. However, it appears that Hillary Clinton may not concede tonight, but will make an almost certainly futile attempt to get superdelegates to swing to her side. No matter what, it appears as though Hillary will not be the top of the ticket.

Despite all the rumors, fanned by Clinton herself today, I don’t see her as VP either. If Obama needs a woman, why not Gov. Katherine Sibelius of Kansas? If he needs to get someone who can resonate with red state voters, why not Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia? The “dream ticket” could just as easily be a nightmare—why share the stage with someone like Hillary Clinton? (Not to mention Bill…)

The other winner tonight is John McCain. Obama is an untested candidate who only just won a battle among his own party. Obama has made rookie mistakes, which can damn a candidate. Even an accomplished politico like John Kerry can die the death of a thousand cuts in a long campaign. Someone like Obama who has never had a competitive campaign outside a state legislative race faces a truly great challenge.

With luck, tonight ends the dominance of the Clinton machine—and good riddance. However, like Freddy Krueger, Hillary Clinton may just come back to terrorize our political discourse again—but not this year.