Four More Years, pt. 4

As stalwart readers will recall, over a year ago I predicted that a Republican would win the 2008 presidential race. At the time, I did not devote much attention to the then-nascent campaign of Barack Obama, except to point out that he was "little more than a cipher, a tabula rasa upon which his supporters can project their wishes and/or fantasies."

Since then - and particularly since he has clinched the Democratic nomination - Illinois' junior Senator has proven himself to worse than a cipher. By way of his frenzied efforts to overcompensate for his manifestly liberal record (such as he has one to speak of), he has singled-handedly alienated his core supporters (see the New York Times) without doing much to endear himself to those who are more typically in the center-right of the electorate, such as religious voters.

Among other things, it is Obama's gift for political flexibility that has led at least one contributor at the American Thinker to suggest that this could be a breakout year for John McCain, who continues to play the tortoise to Obama's hare. Kyle-Anne Shiver posits that with the advent of YouTube, "[e]very gaffe, every misstep, every flip-flop, turn-around and attempted take-back that [Obama] utters... will be viewed by hundreds of thousands of people, who then take their impressions to the office, the diners, the bus stops, the hairdressers and the assembly lines."

She goes on to add:

Americans tend to be a forgiving lot, but each one of us has his own personal limit to the number of take-backs he is willing to allow a single person. I'm predicting that as Obama continues to morph into new positions nearly every day, that a great many voters are going to reach the limit, the point where they stop listening to this candidate because they simply stop trusting his word.

Trust is usually proffered generously, but once lost, disillusionment rarely permits its return, at least not within the confines of 113 days.

How many voters will still trust Obama by November 4th? Perhaps far less than the conventional wisdom is predicting. Time is not on Obama's side.

If anything is for certain this campaign season, it is that Barack Obama has peaked too early - and too spectacularly - as a political contortionist. The recent "Nutgate" flap is yet another concrete example of how the coalition undergirding Obama's candidacy is already fraying under the strain of supporting his titanic political ambitions. In any event, Obama's flip-flops have done him little good overall; as the latest Gallup poll data indicates, McCain and Obama are still in what amounts to a statistical dead-heat. (Update: the latest Rasmussen poll shows the same thing.)

Four More Years!!