Is it Barack Obama’s time?

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.)