Pennsylvania had the possibility of turning a corner in one direction or another, but it didn’t happen. Things might have really gotten interesting if Clinton had surged ahead and grabbed a large number of delegates. Yet not only did that fail to happen, but Obama failed to deliver a knockout punch. Why? I was reading one possible explanation at The Lady Logician which gives us a clue.
As we have seen in the last 10 days, Senator Obama has bought into the “Obamassiah” meme – hook, line and sinker. His sense of “predestination” has been a decided detriment as he just does not have the thick skin needed to trade punches with the Clinton’s AND the national media. Maybe if he had stayed around Illinois state politics a little longer and mixed it up with Mayor Daley a little more often, he might have developed a thicker skin. As it is, many have already opined that if Sen. Obama can not handle the give and take of a national campaign, what will he do when he is faced with a hostile Kim Jong Il or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?
This post should be read in full, but it highlights many of the same questions addressed in this post at Huffington.
To all Super Delegates: you decide who is riskier as a general election candidate. The candidate whose negatives, driven by the right-wing hate machine in the 1990s in particular, are all out there and already taken into account. Or a candidate who is still virtually unknown to most of the electorate, with Republicans clearly looking forward to filling in the blanks with the facts about his record of which many general election voters still are not aware.
Obama has had much going for him, but at this point I have begun to wonder if Hillary and Barack are not in a race to see who can elect John McCain the fastest. Check out the posts linked above for some fresh perspective.