Obama's First Race

As I was drifting off to sleep last night, the thought came to me: no wonder he's having such trouble. This is his first real election.

When you think about it, Obama is completely a creature of the Democratic party. It isn't that he hasn't had tough contests. His rise into the Illinois State Senate was marked by some crafty maneuvering. But it was all in the context of intra-party politics. Ditto the U.S. Senate campaign when he was up against Alan Keyes (insert derisive laughter here.) Ditto the primary campaign against Hillary Clinton. The key in all these races was to either maneuver tactically to solidify the support of the machine, ignore an inept, underfinanced opponent, or, most recently, simply move left until your chief opponent couldn't compete for an votes in angry and energized primary electorate.

The terrain in the general election is as different as the moon is from Mars. It requires figuring out how to bridge from your base to the center which, so far as I can tell, Obama has never been required to do in the past. He's had the luxury of running to represent safe Democratic seats and had his positions ratified in an echo chamber. This makes it easier to understand how he could have muffed the Rick Warren question on abortion so badly. He'd never been in a forum where the question could be posed in a way and before an audience that didn't lend itself to a stock Democrat answer. He simply hadn't thought it through.

This is an interesting contrast to John McCain. Johnny Mac has spent the better part of his career becoming a professional at triangulating between party orthodoxies and the political center. He's had to come to grips with where conservative ideas were right and where he (and many others in the center) found them lacking. He's from a state that is largely, but not exclusively, Republican and in which competitive races between the parties occasionally happen.

Experience counts. In more than one way.