Obama loses momentum during awful August

By last weekend, the alarm bells were ringing in earnest at Barack Obama's HQ. August had turned into a disaster for the Democratic nominee. At precisely the moment the candidate should have been heading towards his coronation in Denver with quiet confidence, John McCain had seized the initiative. While the young senator from Illinois practised surfing in Hawaii, the elderly McCain was busy in the rhetorical trenches, bellowing "We are all Georgians" and staking out an order of battle for the Third World War.
 
Obama lost the battle of the headlines on Georgia and a week later he was in another no-win mess at Pastor Rick Warren's Saddleback evangelical church in Lake Forest, which is heartland Republican terrain in Orange County, south of Los Angeles. Obama and McCain each had their solo hour, answering Warren's questions. McCain won big, with grave, clipped answers on the moral failure of his first marriage, his strategic differences with Ronald Reagan, his opposition to abortion.
 
What McCain did at Saddleback was bring the important Christian evangelical vote back into his column. A week earlier a friend of mine who's an evangelical from near Spartanburg, South Carolina ('the buckle of the bible belt') called me to say all the evangelicals he knew were going to sit this out because they didn't trust McCain. After Saddleback he phoned back to say how impressed he'd been with McCain and predicted that the radio preacher James Dobson, leader of Focus on the Family, might finally endorse the Arizona senator.
 
Beset with gloomy quotes from leading Democrats about the need for their candidate to ratchet up his game and whack McCain, Obama's camp tried to break the remorseless rhythm of bad headlines. They leaked the news that Obama would name his running-mate as vice-presidential candidate in the next two or three days.
 
The tactic worked, somewhat. Inside dopester stories in the press duly followed on the possible picks, from Joe Biden (foreign policy experience, albeit a remorseless gabber) to Evan Bayh (white-bread Indiana Republican lightweight). But on Wednesday the Reuters-Zogby poll reported that McCain had suddenly surged ahead, and was leading Obama nationally 46-41. Reuters-Zogby is well regarded, but this year has a somewhat spotty record. Two other big polls reporting Thursday had Obama leading McCain 45-42.

Polls aside, it's obvious Obama has lost the initiative. Ominously, Democrats are beginning to recall with a shiver John Kerry's disastrous summer in 2004, when his candidacy sagged in the face of a ruthless battering of his war record. It's not just a matter of no-win situations like Saddleback or Obama's refusal to call for Russia’s immediate annihilation. Obama now lags behind McCain as the man the public trusts on economic policy, a topic on which McCain publicly confessed ignorance earlier this year.

Obama even managed to lose the initiative on off-shore oil drilling, a hot issue along the entire US coastline. In July, McCain began taking the oil industry line by saying that, in the interests of the always mythical 'US Energy Independence',  irksome environmental restrictions on off-shore drilling should be tossed aside.

Since public cynicism about the oil companies has been increasing in direct proportion to the oil companies' record profits this summer, it shouldn't have been hard for Obama to paint McCain as a whore for Big Oil and a foe of marine life, usable beaches and a seabed unobstructed by vast platforms. The opportunity was enhanced by a 419,000 gallon oil spill into the Mississippi River the very week McCain was pushing off-shore drilling in Louisiana. But Obama, almost always respectful towards large corporations, declined this golden opportunity.

The problem might be that a man who's come to think of himself as the conduit of Mankind's purest hopes doesn’t want to scuff his shoes by kicking mud in McCain's face. 'McNasty', as the Republican candidate was dubbed at West Point, has no problem doing that, even if his shoes come at $500 a pair.
 
Behind of all this there's the matter of race, prompting some to suspect Obama has no chance in November's polling booths, and never did. As Michael Neumann, a leftist professor of political science put it to me this week, "I still suspect Obama has no chance. Not enough people in enough crucial states will vote for a semi-black metro-sexual, especially when the Republicans get through calumniating him. I'd never vote for him myself, but he's probably preferable. I figure he'd only be as bad as Bush. McCain, I think, is unbalanced enough to start a nuclear war, and not stupid enough to be managed by others."  Sounds just like McCain's mascot,  Mikheil Saakashvili, who gave the Republican his August surprise. ·