Presidential Finals: The Hero Vs. The Hustler

The Battle is drawn. From Here on in the Presidential race is between Senator's Barack Obama and John McCain. America's choice is between the Hustler and the Hero. There is plenty of work to do now. America isn't happy, Obama is promising "happiness" and no substance whatsoever. McCain has a tough job, he must prove that to get back on track we must return to Conservative ideal. He must also attack Obama's character because the man has been caught in so many lies. So what will the campaign look like for the next six months? Read on for one point of view:

Obama vs. McCain: Let's Get It On
By DANIEL HENNINGER

Barack Obama, the first "postracial candidate," is heading to the Democratic nomination almost entirely because of his near-universal support from black voters in the Democratic primaries. In both states Tuesday, his share of that vote was 90% or more. If one resets the black vote to the norm of earlier elections, Hillary Clinton is the nominee.

The idea that Obama was a postracial politician dates to his famous keynote speech at the Democratic Convention in 2004. He set the postracial template himself in the speech's third sentence, describing his father born in a small Kenyan village, herding goats, etc. His mother was "born in a town on the other side of the world, in Kansas."

Wonder Land columnist Dan Henninger speaks to Paul Lin about what the voter demographics say about where the Democratic nomination is going. (May 8)

Over the next three years, writers ratified this postracial definition of Obama's own design. From this idea, a Democratic star arose.

Hillary Clinton, who now resembles the robot's crawling hand in the final scenes of "The Terminator," can plausibly argue to the superdelegates that much of this is electoral bunk. In Indiana, her share of the white vote to his, men and women combined, was 60-40, a huge lead. In North Carolina, 61-37.

They won't buy it. Ever. The "first woman" running for president would have to be pulling 90% of her own piece of history, women, to compete with his achievement. Obama has locked up 90% of a constituency that Democrats not only must have to win in November, but that they've elevated to mythic status the past 40 years.

As well, the black vote came spontaneously to Sen. Obama, without him having to make an overt appeal for their vote, as she did with women.

The Democratic superdelegates are products of their party – nice liberals, nice people. To stiff Obama's black voters at this late hour, most of the superdelegates would have to be as hard and clinical about politics as the Clintons. They aren't.

Obama moves them and validates their commitment to the Democratic idea. Shelby Steele described the force even Hillary can't match in these pages last March: Race lifts the Obama candidacy "to the level of allegory. . . . Because he is black, there is a sense that profound questions stand to be resolved in the unfolding of his political destiny."
[Let's Get It On]
AP

The superdelegates are faced with choosing between the Clinton machine's brutal demographic math and thinking well of themselves. No contest.

Will the national electorate sing from the same hymnal as the superdelegates' offstage chorus? Who knows, but let's get on with finding out.

Barack Obama is going to run an aura campaign. As it has been from the start, it's going to be a speech candidacy, a rhetorical candidacy, a JFK candidacy, the promise of another Camelot.

Listen here to Barack describing what it's all about Monday in Indianapolis: "I believe that this election is bigger than me or John McCain or Hillary Clinton. It's bigger than the Democrats versus Republicans. It's about who we are as Americans." That's as big as it gets.

Will more than 50% of voters want a piece of this dream in November? Will the Rev. Wright specter be gone by then and the "bitter" remark forgiven? Sure. Why not?

By any measure, the country's mood is awful. Some of it is gas prices and some the mysterious mortgage and credit crisis (Barack knows how it happened: "We do need a government that stands up for families who are being tricked out of their homes by Wall Street predators").

Whenever Americans get glum near an election, it's a good bet that pitching their ideals at them will appeal, and thank heavens for that. FDR was an ideals candidate and so was Ronald shining-city-on-a-hill Reagan.

So long as the American mood sits in the dumpster, John McCain will have his hands full. The instinct of the McCain camp will be to compete for the unhappy white vote Hillary leaves behind with lurches toward Obama-like populism. That compulsion was already evident in the demagogic anti-Wall Street passages of his speech on the economy last month.

John McCain needs to find an Achilles heel in this opponent. It's there – not the Wright mess but Obama's dustup with Hillary Sunday on Iran, when he tagged her for "saber rattling" and "tough talk."

Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, collector of centrifuges, makes Jeremiah Wright look like Little Bo Peep. Yet this Tuesday Barack Obama said he assumes the American people will see it is "not weakness, but wisdom to talk not just to our friends, but our enemies, like Roosevelt did, Kennedy did, and Truman did." In the here and now, a more apt name comes to mind: Jimmy Carter.

A grand Enemies Tour awaits President Obama – Iran's Ahmadinejad, Syria's Assad, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, North Korea's Kim Jong Il, an al Qaeda "diplomat" from Osama bin Laden, Sudan's Hassan al-Bashir, Zimbabwe's Mugabe, Burma's junta.

If John McCain can't talk the American people out of re-Carterizing themselves, what has he been preparing for all these years?