The Democratic primaries this year reminded me a little of a football game. In football, for a fast running back, one good way to break a long run (if no one’s looking for it) is to outrun everyone to the sideline, then outrun them down the field. That’s more or less what Sen. Obama did: he outran the field to the left sideline, then outran everyone clear to the endzone. On this read, I guess John Edwards was the blitzing linebacker who gets taken clean out of the play by the fullback, while Hillary Clinton was the safety in deep coverage who initially misreads the play and can’t quite get back into it—she laid a hand on Gayle Sayers Obama (need to keep the Chicago tie; I suppose you could also call him Devin Hester Obama) as he streaked by, but that was about it.Now, this sort of thing is a great way to produce exciting results, get the crowd stirred up and on their feet; but unlike for the Chicago Bears, for the Chicago senator, it has some negative consequences: namely, it ties him pretty closely to the voting record that earned him the label of the most liberal politician in Congress. In the primaries, this was a good thing, because most of those who vote in Democratic primaries are liberals; what’s more, this drove an incredible Internet fundraising machine which raked in unprecedented amounts for Sen. Obama from the liberal Democratic netroots. In the general election, however, this isn’t a good thing, because America’s a pretty centrist place; even if Sen. Obama’s the most exciting politician this country has seen in a long time, and even if the chance to elect a dark-skinned President is extremely alluring (even though he isn’t the descendant of slaves), in the end, the most liberal politician in Congress is going to be too far away from most voters to win in November.So, naturally, having won the primaries by running left as fast as he could, Sen. Obama has now attempted to cut back in toward the middle of the field, rather than just taking the ball down the sideline. The problem is, that isn’t always easy to do, and the early returns might suggest that it isn’t working all that well. I noted a few days ago the drop in Sen. Obama’s poll numbers, offering my own conclusion that the main lesson from them is that we don’t know as much as we think we do; for what it’s worth, though, Dick Morris and Ed Morissey, a pair of savvy political operators, have drawn the conclusion that Sen. Obama’s “series of policy reversals and gaffes” were the primary cause. Morris even went so far as to declare that “Obama has carried flip-flopping to new heights.” I think that’s hyperbole, but Morris does have an important point: “As a candidate who was nominated to be a different kind of politician, Obama has set the bar pretty high. And, with his flipping and flopping, he is falling short, to the disillusionment of his more naïve supporters.” This is particularly important given the thinness of Sen. Obama’s record; we really don’t know much about him as a leader, and he doesn’t have much to point us to beyond what he tells us during the campaign. If his actions tell us that his political convictions are at the service of political expediency—which seems to be what a lot of the netroots folks who’ve driven his fundraising are concluding—then that could really hurt him in the long run, especially against a candidate like John McCain who’s broadly respected for his political integrity (and especially if Sen. McCain chooses a running mate like Sarah Palin who will further point up that contrast).Sen. Obama is a formidably gifted politician who’s shown some remarkable instincts, even as he’s also made a lot of high-profile gaffes; he’s still the favorite in November, though I still think it will be close and I’m personally still betting on the underdog. If he can’t find a way to credibly move to the center without looking like just another politician, though, he could lose that favorite status in a hurry. Archimedes is credited with saying, “Give me a lever and a place to stand, and I will move the world.” Sen. Obama has the lever; can he find the place to stand?

In some senses, yes; obviously, individuals can be. As a matter of practical national politics, though, Dick Morris says “No,” and he has history to back him up. Barack Obama may be moving to the center now, but if he wins in November, the Democratic leadership in Congress will pull him back to his hard-left primary positions, just as they pulled Bill Clinton hard left after his election; and the same sort of thing will happen to all those moderate Democrats the party’s raised up to run in conservative House districts around the country. Whatever their personal positions, they’ll either be reliable votes for the Democratic leadership or they’ll be marginalized right out of Congress. Which is to say, on the national level, there’s really no such thing as a moderate Democrat: whatever they say now, when it comes down to votes, they’ll vote with Nancy Pelosi.

It certainly could be; he’s a gifted campaigner with a strong core of support running in a year when the opposing party is weak and unpopular. On the other hand, there are several good reasons to think it won’t be.First, the circumstances that made the GOP unpopular and led to the debacle of 2006 are shifting, and Sen. Obama isn’t shifting with them. For one, he continues to stick to the narrative that “Iraq is spiraling into civil war, we invaded unwisely and have botched things ever since, no good outcome is possible, and it is time to get out of there as fast as we can” (even though he only took that stance out of political expediency) when more and more people (including even the editorial board of the Washington Post) are noticing that the surge has changed all that. As Michael Barone writes, “It is beyond doubt now that the surge has been hugely successful, beyond even the hopes of its strongest advocates, like Frederick and Kimberly Kagan. Violence is down enormously, Anbar and Basra and Sadr City have been pacified, Prime Minister Maliki has led successful attempts to pacify Shiites as well as Sunnis, and the Iraqi parliament has passed almost all of the ‘benchmark’ legislation demanded by the Democratic Congress—all of which Barack Obama seems to have barely noticed or noticed not at all. He has not visited Iraq since January 2006 and did not seek a meeting with Gen. David Petraeus when he was in Washington.” This is particularly a problem for Sen. Obama given that John McCain can take a sizeable measure of credit for that success: he didn’t order the surge, but he’d been pushing for it since 2003, even when the whole idea was wildly unpopular—which means that he can legitimately associate himself with our current success in Iraq while avoiding any blame for the failure of the pre-surge approach, since he’d opposed that all along.Another change from 2006 is that Congress is no more effective or popular now than it was then, but now the Democrats are running it; which is to say that running against “those incompetent do-nothings in Congress” is a strategy that should still have bite, but now it will be biting Democratic candidates rather than Republican ones. This is particularly true since, as both Barone and Dick Morris point out, the dramatic rise in gas prices has put the Democratic Congress over a barrel (so to speak). Sen. McCain can campaign against them hard on this issue, pushing for offshore drilling (where, as he’s taking care to tell voters, even Hurricane Katrina didn’t cause any spills), drilling in ANWR (especially if he has the wit to put Sarah Palin on the ticket), and even nuclear power (which has worked fine as a major power source in Europe for years now with no problems), and the Democrats will have a hard time countering him; as part of a broader argument that “you voted Democrat two years ago, and what have they done for you? Not much,” this could be devastating.Second, Sen. Obama has a major demographic problem—and no, it’s not the one you think. (Taken all in all, I’d guess that racial prejudices will mostly balance each other out.) The problem, which Noemie Emery laid out in a piece in the Weekly Standard, is the cultural divide among white voters which Barone identified in the Democratic primaries. In Barone’s terms, the split is between Academicians and Jacksonians; Emery defines it this way:

Academicians traffic in words and abstractions, and admire those who do likewise. Jacksonians prefer men of action, whose achievements are tangible. Academicians love nuance, Jacksonians clarity; academicians love fairness, Jacksonians justice; academicians dislike force and think it is vulgar; Jacksonians admire it, when justly applied. Each side tends to look down on the other, though academicians do it with much more intensity: Jacksonians think academicians are inconsequential, while academicians think that Jacksonians are beneath their contempt. The academicians’ theme songs are “Kumbaya” and “Imagine,” while Jacksonians prefer Toby Keith . . . Academicians don’t think “evil forces” exist, and if they did, they would want to talk to them. This, and not color, seems to be the divide.

This division in the electorate would be the reason that, even after the May 6 primaries turned out far below her hopes, Hillary Clinton was still able to crush Sen. Obama in Kentucky and West Virginia—an outcome RealClearPolitics’ Jay Cost predicted. Sen. Obama is an Academician to the bone, perhaps the most non-Jacksonian presidential candidate the Democrats have ever nominated (recall John Kerry’s emphasis on his military experience, and the powerful effect of the Republican attack on that experience); Sen. Clinton, through her toughness and tenacity, was able to keep her campaign going against him by recasting herself as a Jacksonian Democrat (something she certainly had never been before), and thus giving those voters someplace to go against Sen. Obama. Now, in the general election, we’ll see the quintessential Academician, a modern-day Adlai Stevenson, up against the quintessential Jacksonian, a warrior politician for the 21st century. Sen. Obama can certainly pull it off, if he can stop talking to Iowa farmers about arugula, but that’s a matchup which Jacksonians tend to win.Third, just as the “bimbo eruptions” didn’t stop with Gennifer Flowers, so there’s no guarantee we won’t see more problems arise out of Sen. Obama’s friends and associates. We’ve already heard about a number of his unsavory connections, but every so often, a new one makes a scene (as Fr. Michael Pfleger recently did, driving Sen. Obama to finally remove his membership from Trinity UCC); and while it might be possible to defend him by saying, “these are all past connections—Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Tony Rezko, James Meeks, Bernadette Dohrn, Nadhmi Auchi, Michael Pfleger, they’re all past history, old stories, irrelevant to who he is now,” that doesn’t hold up very well when you look at the people he continues to associate with. How is it possible to dismiss his connections to the Chicago political machine, racist preachers, American terrorists, and international criminals as irrelevant when his first appointment as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee was Eric Holder, to chair his effort to choose a VP candidate? At some point, you just have to say, this pattern of associations tells us something important about Sen. Obama—who he is, how he thinks, what he values, what matters to him; and at some point, you have to figure that the problems his associates have already given him aren’t likely to stop coming. Again, he could overcome this; but depending on what happens and when, he might not.Taken all in all, I have to say, I don’t think he will; I think it will be close, but I think in the end, Sen. McCain will come out on top. Sen. Obama might steal a few states out of the GOP column, but between Minnesota, Michigan and Pennsylvania, I think he’ll lose a couple as well, and I think the end result will look a lot like 2004 at the presidential level—and at the lower levels, maybe not good, but not a worst-case scenario, either. (And maybe I’ll be wrong about all that; as I’ve already noted, nobody’s been right about much, this campaign season.)

When Steve Sailer wondered back in January if the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. was trying to submarine Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy, I could see his logic, but I thought it was a classic case of logic subverting reason. When Michael Barone wondered the same thing a month ago, building on Sailer’s argument, I started to consider the idea, because Barone’s just too good an observer to dismiss—but still, the idea seemed crazy. Occam’s Razor seemed to suggest that the Rev. Dr. Wright was saying and doing the things he was saying and doing not out of any ulterior motive, but simply because this is who he is; this is what he preaches because this is what he believes. (He also believes, it appears, that black folks and white folks have different brains, which is a bit of racist crackpottery I’d normally expect out of the very KKK he attacks.) He might have been damaging Sen. Obama’s campaign, but it didn’t seem necessary to conclude he was doing so intentionally.After the Rev. Dr. Wright’s media offensive this past weekend, however (I use the term advisedly), I’m not at all so sure. Marc Ambinder says that “Wright is throwing Obama under the bus” (an ironic return for Sen. Obama’s attempt to save his pastor by throwing Granny under the bus), while Clive Crook, Dana Milbank and Joe Klein have now come to the same conclusion as Sailer and Barone. Indeed, Klein takes it a step further:

Wright’s purpose now seems quite clear: to aggrandize himself—the guy is going to be a go-to mainstream media source for racial extremist spew, the next iteration of Al Sharpton—and destroy Barack Obama.

Certainly it’s hard to come to any other conclusion than that the Rev. Dr. Wright deliberately “reignited a controversy about race from which Obama had only recently recovered—and added lighter fuel.” Some people are even wondering now if the Clintons put him up to it.The sad thing is, it may very well work—and I do truly believe it will be a sad, sad day for this country if it does. Granted, I had no intention whatsoever of voting for Sen. Obama, but I wanted to believe in his integrity and his vision even if I can’t accept his political ideas; I wanted to believe that win or lose, he could help America take another step or two away from the racism of the past. Now, after all we’ve seen of his friends, his view of the people of this country (which echoes his wife’s bitterness at America) and the way he plays politics, I can’t respect him anymore, and I definitely want him to lose on his merits. That said, if 15% of the electorate votes for John McCain simply because Barack Obama has dark skin, as some sharp observers think will happen, that would be a shameful thing, and I don’t want to see that. But that’s where the Rev. Dr. Wright is heading us—that’s where he’s driving the bus—and it seems, increasingly, that he’s doing so because he’d rather inflame and exacerbate our nation’s internal divisions than be proved wrong about them. If so, that’s despicable. Barack Obama should have exercised much better care in his choice of friends; he shouldn’t have wasted his time on a pastor who could betray him (and his country) like that.