Tired Barack Obama Resorts To Aggression

He seems tired, brittle and more aggressive, and some of his appealing hope and charisma have been dispensed with.

Five days after losing to Hillary Clinton in the Pennsylvania primary, Barack Obama has taken off the gloves in his battle to win the American presidency - and in so doing has left critics wondering whether he is not just another conventional politician grubbing for votes.

In Indiana on Friday, scene of his next showdown with Mrs Clinton, he deployed sharper verbal onslaughts to go with the attack advertisements he has begun to run. Tackling the former first lady on health care, her key campaign issue, he said: "Here's the difference between Senator Clinton and myself. All these folks who talk about how experienced they are, you ask yourself, 'Why haven't we got health-care reform?' I'll get it done in my first term."

On Iraq, a war he opposed from the start, he is blunter than ever. "I was right. Those who voted for it, like Hillary Clinton and John McCain, were wrong."

But in the battle to secure the Democratic presidential nomination, it is Mr Obama who has not "got it done". He is convincingly, perhaps insurmountably, ahead in the number of states won, his share of the popular votes cast, and his tally of elected delegates. But he has yet to win over enough party grandees, the "super-delegates", to be sure of securing the nomination.

If he fails to wrest Indiana from Mrs Clinton, who is slightly ahead in the polls, his campaign fears that the remaining uncommitted super-delegates will lose faith in his ability to win and back his rival instead.

Defeat to Mrs Clinton by 10 points in Pennsylvania on Tuesday provided proof that recent ill-chosen words about working-class Americans who "cling" to God and guns because they are "bitter" about their economic hardship have hurt his candidacy. So, too, has his association with Jeremiah Wright, the incendiary pastor of his Chicago church.

advertisementWhere once Mr Obama emphasised what he could do for voters, at a town hall meeting in Kokomo, north of Indianapolis, he stressed instead what they could do for him. "I need you to fight for me, right here, right now," he pleaded.

He has spent a week facing accusations that he does not identify with ordinary voters. As he courted senior citizens on Friday he tried a little bonding. "Seniors, listen up. I'm getting grey hair myself. Running for president will age you quick."

It is not just his hair that is changing tone. The frontrunner, who had the nomination in the palm of his hand a month ago on the back of soaring rhetoric and a pledge to transform politics, sounds different, too. The Democratic battle increasingly resembles a civil war, with recognisable Cavaliers and Roundheads.

Mr Obama emerged, like Oliver Cromwell, as a challenger to the established order, with his New Model Army of students and internet donors, to unseat Mrs Clinton, whose apparent belief in her divine right to rule the Democrats echoed the doctrine of the Stuart monarchy.

But as the overwhelming favourite to take on Republican John McCain in November's election, Mr Obama now exhibits irritation at his need to keep explaining himself to those voters - including the white working class, older, women and Catholics - who remain stubbornly resistant to his charms. The Pennsylvania campaign created a New Model Obama who, in addition to running attack adverts, complains about media scrutiny of his missteps.

The conservative columnist David Brooks, once an admirer, complained that he has morphed into "a more conventional politician", guilty of "the sorts of fibs, evasions and hypocrisies that are the stuff of conventional politics". The liberal commentator Paul Krugman condemned Mr Obama's reliance on the message that Mrs Clinton is unlikely to overcome his lead among pledged delegates. "'Yes we can' has become 'No she can't'," he wrote last week.

It is all a far cry from February, when the Republican senator Mitch McConnell joked that the Democratic race featured a New York senator born in Illinois, and an Illinois senator "who seems to have been born in a manger".

In the sweltering heat of a school sports hall, Mr Obama is still slick, at times uplifting, but the edges are flintier, the irritation at the same old questions about claims that he disrespects the American flag, more pronounced. "It's a lie," he finally blurts about the claim, after giving a laboured history of his patriotism.

Minutes later a young man is on his feet bursting with enthusiasm as he declares Mr Obama the candidate for his generation. "He's got energy," Mr Obama observes. "I want to plug him in. We could run a generator on him." The moment serves to reinforce the contrast with the candidate, who is clearly tired and lacks the electric energy of two months back.

Linda Colbert, 64, a Kokomo resident, believes he is feeling the pressure of failing to seal the nomination. "He's trying to get more aggressive," she said. "I don't think he expected it to be this close and now he's tightening up because he's got to get over the finish line."

Campaign insiders say the senator will do more to stress his humble roots as the scholarship schoolboy son of a single mother. In Indianapolis last week he pledged to "remind people of where I come from. I was raised with far fewer advantages than either of my two remaining opponents." In Kokomo he peppered his rally speech with references to his days as a community organiser in Chicago "helping folk laid off when the steel mills closed". Yet the poise with which he carries himself can seem aloof. There remains a suspicion that he is reluctant to tailor his appeal to those voters who want their president to be someone like them.

Senator Obama is gracing the next cover of GQ magazine, the men's style bible. One quote released by the magazine is revealing: "I'm in this to win and I think I will win. But I'm also going to emerge intact. I'm going to be Barack Obama and not some parody."

Democrat strategists say his campaign is carefully nailing down the pledges of super-delegates, to wheel out after the final primary on June 3. One strategist told The Sunday Telegraph that he has seen a list of 50 names ready to declare for Mr Obama within days of the last vote, but that his campaign expects to have up to 150, enough to clinch the nomination.

If he is to solidify his advantage, New Model Obama must combine some of the early Cavalier flair, with a bit more Roundhead pragmatism. Or come June, it may be his head the super-delegates chop off.

Yup.

The only thing Obama has left to do is angrily point and loudly shout, "White Devils."

I know he wants to shout that phrase given his devious friendships, comments and speeches.

While he is too much of a coward and snake to reveal his true beliefs, he certainly has hinted at them over the past few months with his "typical white person" comment and his close ties to vile black racists.

But a candidate that is losing has to do something different in order to have a chance to win. The candidate that changes tactics is always losing.

That is so true. Remember sKerry and his flip flops? He did everything possible to change his image. That worked real well. < /sarc

42 posted on 04/27/2008 5:58:37 AM PDT by Arrowhead1952 (Typical white person, bitter, religious, gun owner, who will "Just say No to BO (or HRC).")

“whether he is not just another conventional politician grubbing for votes.”

I can’t recall any other politician grubbing for votes by attacking his own grandmother. Obama is in a class by himself.

The thing that keeps Obama from saying “White Devils” is that he is half white. And his daddy was the black sperm to his mama’s white egg. He is still against cross”race” relationships (he wrote about calling a friend of his an uncle tom for dating a white girl) but he cannot claim that his “black mom” was “oppressed” by the “white man”.

He is CRAZY screwed up over his broken Marxist home. A red diaper doper baby gone wrong and lashing out at the world.

Get him some counseling and keep him away from adult business, please.

To those who claim that there will be a riot in Colorado if Obama doesn’t get the nomination AND that Obama is easier to beat in the general election...

Considering how we were at the brink of Leftist revolutionaries rioting in the streets in 2000 and 2004, what makes you think that we won’t have a civil war break out in 2008 if Obama is the Democrat candidate and he loses in November? Say by 5%?

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