Obama's problem tonight was the same thing that's beginning to make a lot of people wonder: Is there anything beneath the commanding presence and the sparkling rhetoric of "change"? When Brian Williams wound up to what he clearly thought was the defining question of the night--what would you do if two American cities were hit by Al Qaeda?--Obama appeared to panic so badly that he lost the ability to hear what was being asked. The shell is handsome and it shimmers with freshness, much the way Edwards's did in 2004. But hold it up to your ear, as we all did tonight, and thus far there's nothing but the hollow echo of the sea roaring back beautifully.
The bigger problem for Obama, heading down the road, is that he does not appear to have a populist streak even half an inch wide. And we are steaming toward an election that will, particularly in the South, be defined by two issues: Iraq, of course, along with the slow-burning economic catastrophe that is finally beginning to hit home in a conscious and frightening way with working-class and middle-class Americans. As I've talked to black and white and Hispanic Southerners these past six weeks, Iraq has always been the first subject that has come up--and with a level of anger, frustration and passion that was rarely matched on that stage in Orangeburg tonight, except perhaps when Gravel quite convincingly pronounced himself "frightened" by the wishy-washiness of some of his fellow candidates on the issue. But folks already knew, before these festivities, that their best bet to end the Iraq disaster lies with the Democrats.
Nope, he's no populist. I don't even think he's much to the left of Harold Ford, Jr.
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