Obama’s bigger advantage is that the party is actually excited about him and thinks he could win. ~Jacob Weisberg, Slate

In my official capacity as the person in Illinois responsible for pouring cold water on all enthusiastic Obamania, I simply have to laugh at this one….Still laughing….There really is no other response appropriate to a column that begins by saying that conventional wisdom and political reality were first overturned by an appearance on Oprah.  I know that daytime talk shows are supposed to be the new black of political venues (last time around it was late-night talk shows), but this is too much.  Which party thinks he could win?  The Democratic Party?  I don’t believe it.  I don’t believe it because I don’t think Democrats are quite that detached from reality. 

Could John Edwards win last time?  No.  He was ill-served to be encouraged into jumping into the contest last time, as Obama is being ill-served now.  Frankly, I would be thrilled to watch him run and get creamed in the hurly-burly of the primaries; a man who has only had to appear more reasonable and normal than Alan Keyes and Bobby Rush up till now is not ready for the back-and-forth of the primary battle with serious opponents.  And it seems to me that Edwards had a better shot at winning the nomination and the general election two years ago than Obama does in ’08.  Should Obama run in ’08 and even manage to get the VP nod, unless the ticket wins, he will be headed down the route of Lieberman and could end up boasting in ’12 of a three-way split decision for third place in New Hampshire.  Since WWII, losing VP nominees almost never come back, and they didn’t usually come back before then, either.  Ask John Sparkman (who?), Estes Kefauver, William Miller (who?), Ed Muskie (good times!), Sargent Shriver, Lloyd Bentsen, Dan Quayle (who was, of course, Vice President at the time that he lost), Jack Kemp, and Joe Lieberman.  John Edwards is set to join this storied and noble company of also-rans.  The only ones who did lose as a VP nominee and come back to get the presidential nomination the next time (or many years later) were Walter Mondale and Bob Dole (the spirit of ’76 lives!) and, well, you know the story with both of them.  Bottom line: if Obama doesn’t get the presidential nomination this time, he might be set up for a chance to be Vice President in someone else’s administration, but, like the ridiculous Al Gore, he will never win in his own right unless he has the tremendous good fortune of serving with an extremely popular President in good economic times. 

The candidate who gets hot early and gets all the buzz, as Dean did two years ago, seems like a major player but ultimately burns out or, in Dean’s case, crashes into the side of a mountain.  As a media favourite, Obama will get all the love and attention he could want and, like McCain in 2000, he will seem a formidable opponent until it comes time for people to actually vote.  Then he will get clobbered when he actually has to start saying things about policy and has to start defending his limited but seriously left-leaning voting record (he had a 100 ADA rating for 2005).  There is no one on the other side with a comparably high ACU rating even contemplating running for President, in part because there are relatively few people who are that consistently conservative (at least by ACU definitions) in the current GOP and none of them could expect to beat the party establishment’s preferred candidates.     

In case the fire for the South Side Kid has not been doused by ridicule, perhaps some cold, hard reality will help: he has no organisation, he doesn’t even have a PAC yet to my knowledge, and he has raised no significant sums of money.  Once upon a time, this wouldn’t have mattered two years before the big event, but nowadays serious presidential contenders need a well-staffed organisation and resources and they need to start extremely early.  For someone who has become a media darling over the past two years, his name recognition is surprisingly low (42% do not even know who he is).  His unfavourables right now are good (14%), but that a virtual unknown, junior senator has any unfavourable rating after the media lovefest he has enjoyed cannot really be that encouraging.  (Romney comparison: Romney’s name recognition is similarly limited, and his fav/unfav is almost identical.)  He is receiving press and attention from partisans because, like Mitt Romney, he serves as the empty vessel into which each party can pour all of its hopes and dreams.  Once they discover what is already inside the vessel they have chosen, they may not like what they find. 

Both are considered desirable candidates because they are not Clinton and McCain respectively.  Everyone acknowledges that Clinton and McCain are, alas, the front-runners and have impressive leads over all challengers, but almost everyone also wishes that this were not the case.  Progressives have all kinds of gripes with Clinton and the New Democrat position she represents; they believe the Clintons wrecked their party, and electorally speaking no one can say that the DLC approach has exactly worked wonders.  She supported the war, and Obama even opposed the war in the first place, while progressive antiwar folks desperately want to find somebody who is Not Hillary.  I can sympathise.  We all wish that we could just wish her away. 

Meanwhile, conservatives and party flacks alike look at Romney and see someone who seems more serious about social conservative issues (even if he is coming to it very late in the day) and who is not a “maverick,” which is to say that party faithful do not see him as a traitor and self-serving saboteur like McCain.  Party men view McCain with suspicion, religious conservatives don’t trust the man as far as they can throw him (and they would like to give him the old heave-ho) and he has a nice mix of all the most obnoxious positions to alienate foreign policy realists, small-government conservatives and libertarians.  Romney serves as a useful alternative, because there really is no one else, which is as depressing a thought as the thought that McCain is right now the likely nominee.  Many things change in the course of a campaign, but unlike the GOP, which likes to pick the pol who decides that it is “his turn” to be the nominee, the Democrats have an annoying habit of leaving the selection more in the hands of primary voters, which means that the candidates with the best organisation tend to do better (Dean’s legions of online supporters ultimately proved to be rather useless in doing the necessary legwork that a real campaign organisation would have provided).  Obama “energises” and “excites” people, but can he get a lot of them to slog through the snow in Iowa and New Hampshire for him?  He is charismatic, but can he actually run a first-rate campaign?  Nobody knows, which is why all of this talk about how “Obama can win” is meaningless and will be as transitory as the Deaniacs’ great rebellion.  If Obama wants to have a future as a credible candidate, he will stay out this time.  No smart pol wants to have to clean up after Bush’s mess in Iraq; no one wants to be the one responsible for withdrawing the soldiers from Iraq.  It would be cynical and calculating to stay out, and people are apparently supposed to think that Obama is some starry-eyed idealist come to save us from cynicism (which is the biggest lie of them all), but he will come out a winner in the long run if he does steer clear of the ’08 race.