Barack Obama Night at RSI

Barack Obama Night at RSI

Obama Rolls. Barack Obama crushed Hillary Clinton in Virginia and Washington DC with majorities of 75, 60, and 64. Hillary didn't congratulate him, but I don't see any reason why I shouldn't.

Congratulations to the Obama campaign.

Obama's also moving ahead in the delegate count and he's poised to be a better front-runner than Hillary. I think that Hillary would make a better president than Obama, but he'll be the stronger front-runner. There's tremendous enthusiasm associated with his candidacy and the Obama campaign is doing an equally tremendous job of taking advantage of that enthusiasm.

That's not the case with Hillary's campaign. Her support has always been fragile in the sense that her numbers sink whenever she or one of her surrogates slip up and they've had really bad slips with the black community.

In fact, another Hillary surrogate, Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, slipped up tonight by claiming that Obama would lose a lot of votes in Pennsylvania because he's black. Rendell's facts are right. I've got relatives in Northern Pennsylvania who I'm sure wouldn't vote for Obama for racist reasons and I ran into plenty of racists in Philadelphia. But the politics of that kind of statement are ham-handed and stupid. He's implying that Hillary Clinton would welcome the white racist vote just as much as someone like Ronald Reagan or George Bush. That's not only stupid, it's morally wrong. Rendell's also stupidly implying that Obama would deserve to win the Pennsylvania primary if so many racists weren't voting. Why couldn't he just say that Hillary has been making an effective case for herself in Pennsylvania.

That's the kind of dumb statement that cuts into Hillary's already fragile vote and makes it more likely that Obama will win. With friends like Rendell, Hillary doesn't need enemies.

Obama's Friends. I'm not sure Barack Obama's friends are so hot either. Obama endorsers Claire McCaskill and Tim Johnson were among the 19 Senate Democrats who voted against key Democratic amendments to the awful warrantless wiretap/telecom immunity legislation that passed the U. S. Senate today. As Glenn Greenwald points out in a great post, people like McCaskill and Johnson aren't necessarily voting to endorse the Bush administration's criminal behavior just out of fear of the Republicans or the corruption engendered by telecom lobbying cash. They also believe that the Bush administration should be able to do what it wants and that the telecom companies that cooperated with them should not be held accountable. If Obama is going to carrying out massive change as president, how is he going to do so with a substantial rump of Democratic Senators who see the world in the same terms as Dick Cheney unless he's carrying a very big hammer. That's not to mention the weak and easily influenced Democratic leadership of Senators like Harry Reid and Jay Rockefeller.

Obama as Symbol. Joe Biden famously used a racial stereotype to refer to Barak Obama as "clean." But Obama actually is becoming a symbol of someone who is clean in the sense of not being tainted by controversy, failure, or any of the other kinds of scars that accumulate with sustained presence in any area of endeavor.

Don Banks of SI.com picked up on this theme while interviewing an NFL head coaching candidate about the new trend to hire NFL head coaches who had neither head coaching or coordinator experience.

"To me, the whole run on these head coaches this year is a little like Barack Obama's candidacy,'' the coach said. "The experience factor may be light, but these guys who don't even have any coordinating experience, they're squeaky clean. They don't have any negatives that you can attack. The interesting thing is that their lack of a track record is actually seen as a positive.

"I can't help but think that if a guy is that clean, he sells better. If you have no blemishes, you can mold them and spin them to your fans and the media any way you want. Hillary Clinton voted for the Iraq War because she was in the Senate at the time, and if she hadn't, she probably would have been labeled a traitor. But it's still being held against her, while Obama didn't have to cast a vote, so he can say he was against the war from the very start.''

Like untested NFL coaches, Barack Obama is selling better as a candidate than the battle-scarred Hillary Clinton. As is the case with NFL coaches, however, the very difficult problems of American government are not going to go away if Barack Obama is elected president. Obama's campaign has been very good at portraying him as a squeaky clean, no blemishes kind of candidate and the right hasn't succeeded in bruising him up with their racial innuendo at all. But the question that bothers me is whether Obama would remain squeaky clean after he started withdrawing troops from Iraq, dealing with the federal budget, and getting any kinds of meaningful reform legislation through the Congressional meat-grinder.

I don't think so and I'm wondering what Plan B is going to be.