Rich: Who’s Afraid of Barack Obama?

[RamboLiberal]

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The Washington wisdom about Mr. Obama has often been just as wrong as that about Mrs. Clinton. We kept being told he was making rookie mistakes and offering voters wispy idealistic sentiments rather than the real beef of policy. But what the Beltway mistook for gaffes often was the policy.

Mr. Obama’s much-derided readiness to talk promptly and directly to the leaders of Iran and Syria, for instance, was a clear alternative, agree with it or not, to Mrs. Clinton’s same-old Foggy Bottom platitudes on the subject. His supposedly reckless pledge to chase down Osama bin Laden and his gang in Pakistan, without Pakistani permission if necessary, was a pointed rebuke of both Mrs. Clinton’s and President Bush’s misplaced fealty to our terrorist-enabling “ally,” Pervez Musharraf. Like Mr. Obama’s prescient Iraq speech of 2002, his open acknowledgment of the Pakistan president’s slipperiness turned out to be ahead of the curve.

Now that the Beltway establishment, jolted by the Iowa polls, is frantically revising its premature blueprints for a Clinton coronation and declaring, as Time’s inevitable cliché would have it, that Mr. Obama has “found his voice,” it’s worth looking at some campaign story lines that have been ignored so far. They tell us more than the hyped scenarios that have fallen apart. Indeed, they flip the standard narrative of Campaign 2008 on its head: Were Mr. Obama to best Mrs. Clinton for the Democratic nomination, he may prove harder for the Republicans to rally against and defeat than the all-powerful, battle-tested Clinton machine.

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But much like the Clinton campaign itself, the Republicans have fallen into a trap by continuing to cling to the Hillary-is-inevitable trope. They have not allowed themselves to think the unthinkable — that they might need a Plan B to go up against a candidate who is not she. It’s far from clear that they would remotely know how to construct a Plan B to counter Mr. Obama. The repeated attempts to fan “rumors” that he is a madrassa-indoctrinated Muslim — whether on Fox News or in The Washington Post, where they resurfaced scurrilously on the front page on Thursday — are too demonstrably false to survive endless reruns even in the Swift-boating era.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/opinion/02rich.html?hp

[tomreedtoon]

1. The Repub's are ready. With "Plan N."

They just have to start using that word in the South and the Rust Belt, among their greatest allies, the embittered Vietnam Vets and the unemployed factory workers, and that's it. It would be the dirtiest campaign in perhaps a decade, but when has that stopped any Republican?

[adnelson60087]

2. I think the South and Midwest would largely balk at an Obama

run as the Prez. There is still a lot of hate and bias out here that many of the folks on the West and East coasts don't register or want to believe.

[Democrats_win]

3. Always great articles from Rich. This is a small matter, but Obama was right, HRC wrong.

Amazing that Rich would pick up on the fact that Obama was right about going into Pakistan and getting Osama. Recall how HRC was almost condescending toward Obama saying that someone with more experience would never say such a thing?

Yeah, right! We are still sending money to Pakistan's dictator. He's doing nothing to help America, but he IS rounding up honest people in his own country. Thanks Hillary. (She still is no Bush*t who spent over $1 Trillion to NOT get Osama.)

The conventional wisdom of HRC and so many politicians is sickening. HRC doesn't get it. Progressives would love to see her succeed, but we can't stand her conventionality. The fact that bush hasn't been impeached shows that conventionality isn't limited to HRC. It's not that conventionality is such a bad thing, but we need real and drastic changes--yesterday.

Meanwhile bush breaks every rule in the book as corporate Thieves and their Republican accomplices rip off every honest American. Truly, it is almost criminal for Democrats to not take a very hard line against everything that is going on. Yeah they did good in not letting bush appoint that homophobe as Surgeon general. We need good, real action to help Americans and to prevent the coming collapse of our country.