The vacuity of Obama supporters is there for all to see.

I’ve got news for all the latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust fund babies crowding in to hear him speak! This guy won’t last a round against the Republican attack machine. He’s a poet, not a fighter. ~Tom Buffenbarger

Meanwhile, Obama racks up the endorsement of the Boilermakers and will soon have the Teamsters as well.  Obviously, nothing says “latte-drinking” like James Hoffa. 

It may be right that Obama will fare poorly against Republican attacks, and I do think that the impression he leaves that he is somehow above it all will dissatisfy Democrats who prefer a more combative, brawler style.  However, the electoral reality that used to support this critique of Obama as the candidate of wine-track yuppies and spoiled college kids has changed.  In Wisconsin he prevailed with the support of many low-income Midwestern white voters whose support he hadn’t received on this scale before in the nominating contest.  The regular Democratic voters, the “Mondale coalition” types, who were Clinton’s bedrock, have begun moving to him.  Complaints like the one above are the yelps of those constituencies that backed the wrong horse.  They are now striking out angrily, because this is not how it’s supposed to work.  The establishment candidate is supposed to lock down the core constituencies of the party, and the drippy progressive protest candidate is supposed to go away after “injecting new ideas” into the debate.  That is the way it has worked in the modern nominating process for almost thirty years, so you can imagine how the people who sided with the establishment in this cycle are feeling ripped off.

Update: Apparently the crowd Buffenbarger was addressing started booing him, and others were trying to shoo him off the stage.  It’s a good thing the Clintons have a solid, disciplined campaign operation, or else they might have problems!

Now that the remarkable size of Obama’s Wisconsin victory is clear (a 17-point margin), it seems right to say that it’s really all over on the Democratic side except for the crying.  The Democrats have marched themselves over the cliff.  They have nominated the one candidate who can lose them an election they should never have lost.  They are responsible for the coming McCain Administration.  I hope they’re happy.

In an otherwise sound column about Michelle Obama, Michelle Malkin concludes with this howler:

Like Lady Macbeth, Lady Michelle and her defenders protest too much.

But Lady Macbeth didn’t “protest too much.”  The line comes from Hamlet, when Hamlet’s mother observes that the queen in the play she, Hamlet and Claudius are watching “protests too much.”  Besides, we need to get our story straight–Hillary Clinton is Lady Macbeth, while Michelle Obama is clearly auditioning for the role of Goneril.

P.S.  On a random Lear-related note, I heartily recommend the BBC production Second Generation for a British desi adaptation of the classic.

At the 2004 Democratic convention, he visited with Newsweek reporters and editors, including me. I came away deeply impressed by his intelligence, his forceful language and his apparent willingness to take positions that seemed to rise above narrow partisanship. Obama has become the Democratic presidential front-runner, precisely because countless millions have formed a similar opinion. It is, I now think, mistaken. ~Robert Samuelson

Samuelson describes Obama’s agenda as “completely ordinary, highly partisan, not candid and mostly unresponsive to many pressing national problems.”  He may be one of the first regular columnists to peer beyond the pleasant “mirage” of Obama’s hype to see the empty deserts that are really there.

There’s a post on Russia and Byzantium that I have up at The American Scene and Cliopatria.  Consider this an open thread on the post and related subjects.

He was saying some smart things about the war, and then Obama started going meta again in his Houston rally speech.  Now he’s talking about the “meaning of hope” and his family background.  “If you talk about hope, you’re fuzzy-headed, you’re not realistic, you’re peddling in false hopes.”  He then repeats his boilerplate about what hope is not.  Now he’s bad-mouthing cynics–that doesn’t sound very unifying to me!

Rasmussen shows Obama defeating McCain 50-38 in Nevada with 9% preferring “some other candidate” and 2% “not sure.”  (For comparison, Clinton trails McCain 40-49 in the same poll.)  Nevada is one of the states Rasmussen lists as a “toss-up,” but if these numbers can be believed it isn’t much of a toss-up in an Obama v. McCain contest.  Looking at the crosstabs for this poll, I find myself completely disbelieving what I see.  Consider: among conservatives, Obama receives 30%, while Clinton receives a measly 9%.  Does that make any sense to you?  It certainly doesn’t to me.  25% of Republicans prefer Obama, while only 11% prefer Clinton.  McCain poaches 22% of Democrats in either match-up.  I can understand why that many conservatives and Republicans might express a preference for “some other candidate” out of frustration, but how are this many people concluding that Obama is, in fact, better than McCain on those things where McCain angers them? 

The age factor appears to be working to Obama’s advantage in a big way with some of the youngest cohorts: the 30-39 year olds prefer him 63-34, while he narrowly wins among the 18-29 year olds, who are split more or less evenly three ways.  It’s encouraging to know that at least one of three people from my age group have some common sense.  McCain’s numbers among the different age groups eerily mirror Clinton’s exit poll data from Wisconsin tonight: he loses every group except 65+, and he loses them badly.  If this held up for the rest of the year Obama would win in a landslide, but I predict that this is not going to hold up.   

Both McCain and Clinton have impressively high unfav ratings at 53 and 59% respectively, while Obama has just 38% unfav.  Of the three, he is obviously the only one with net positive ratings.  This will change significantly over the next eight months.

With early exits indicating an Obama thrashing of Clinton up north, it may be time to start thinking about the Obama v. McCain match-up in greater detail.  In the first installment, New Hampshire.

It makes perfect sense that Obama is trouncing McCain in early New Hampshire polling.  Not only has New Hampshire been trending Democratic for several years now, but all those independents who likely rallied to McCain when the media made it seem as if Obama was going to win in a walk have gone back to the Democrats.  But strength in New Hampshire won’t necessarily tell us who the stronger national candidate is.  In the last two cycles, the New Hampshire winner received fewer popular votes nationwide.  If my guess about Obama’s general election weakness against McCain is right, that could happen again.  As I’ve said before, there are certain battleground states (particularly New Mexico, Florida) where McCain should win handily, and New Mexico has historically been a reliable indicator of the national result.