OBAMA CAN'T WIN IN NOVEMBER
Obama can't win.
It's not that complex, really. He just can't win.
A candidate who can't win over his own party certainly can't win over the country.
The traits and flaws which make him an unacceptable candidate to roughly a third of Democrats will make him an unacceptable candidate to a majority of Americans.
And that's how you lose elections.
This isn't meant to bash him, it's just meant to be honest and lay the cards on the table. The nagging question from the Clinton camp -- Why can't he close the deal? -- is legitimate and haunting, and it gets to the point. Barack Obama has fared poorly in big, electorally rich states in his quest for the Democratic nomination. The reasons for that are only going to be exacerbated when he faces independents and Republicans.
And here are those reasons.
Barack Obama is a black nationalist with a condescending attitude toward people who are different from him and, just for good measure, he has the most liberal voting record in the United States Senate. His viewpoints on taxation are confiscatory, his attitudes toward entitlement are socialist, his thoughts on the war are defeatist.
And he doesn't seem to like white people who live in small towns, own guns or go to church.
And those attitudes don't win many friends across the electorate. And before you denounce that perspective as racist or reactionary or unfair, please note that it is an assessment which has been made by hundreds of thousands of Democrat primary voters.
And if the white Democrats don't think they can trust you, you don't have a chance with the white Republicans. If Democrats think you're too liberal, you're not going to win over very many independents or conservatives.
Though I am a Republican, and am going to vote for John McCain, the Hillary Clinton campaign has a very valid point when it raises the issue of Barack Obama's electability. They are right to point out that he doesn't have any. The darling of the news media and the favorite most liberal Democrats is not a good match for the country as a whole.
Barack Obama has been a fulltime candidate for a year, and today West Virginia Democrats are going to hand him his lunch. Barack Obama has been a fulltime candidate for a year, and he couldn't win California, New York, Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan or Florida. That's a murderer's row of electoral-vote states and Obama whiffed in each one of them.
Granted, he came close in some, and two of them the Democrats aren't going to count, but in the states where you need to win a majority of voters to become president, he hasn't even gotten a majority of Democrats.
And he's running against a liberal Republican who appeals to independents and disaffected Democrats.
Against a conservative, maybe people would rally to Obama as an alternative, but against a Republican who's not very Republican, he's more frightening to the center than is his opponent.
So the math on Barack Obama becoming president is sketchy at best. His only hope is that Democrats rally to him with complete enthusiasm, that bygones are truly bygones, and that somehow John McCain has a meltdown that completely alienates everyone but diehard Republicans. Barack Obama's best hope is that Democrat hatred for George W. Bush can be transplanted -- without a good reason -- to John McCain. That's why Obama says McCain is running for Bush's third term, because he knows he can't beat McCain, but he can beat Bush.
The last successful Democratic presidential candidate who campaigned as a liberal was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton all campaigned and were seen by the voters as moderates. Some of them didn't turn out to be, but they kept that little fact hidden until after the election. There is a reason they did it that way -- America isn't really comfortable with liberals, not in a majority way.
That's why candidates like Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy, Michael Dukakis and John Kerry have done so poorly. They each were clearly identified as liberals -- in fairly liberal eras -- and they all lost.
Though he has since taken a hard-left turn, Al Gore campaigned as a moderate -- and scored a virtual tie for the presidency.
America doesn't like liberals in the White House. That's why there have been so few of them there. Just Wilson, Roosevelt, Carter and Clinton in a century.
Obama's liberalism goes against the electoral experience of the Democratic Party and against the electoral tastes of the American people.
His arrogance and elitism, and his 20 years of listening to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, are just icing on the cake.
If a man can't even win his own party, it's not likely he can win the country.
Barack Obama has faced the Democratic primary voters and he couldn't win their nomination. He couldn't quite get it over the top.
And that's just how he will do in November.
- by Bob Lonsberry © 2008
