Tests Ahead for Obama
By Bob Novak
Washington Post
Buyer's remorse was beginning to afflict supporters of Barack Obama before Tuesday's primary election returns showed he had delivered a knockout punch against Hillary Clinton. The young orator who had seemed so fantastic, beginning with his 2007 Jefferson-Jackson dinner speech in Iowa, disappointed even his own advisers over the past two weeks, and old party hands mourned that they were stuck with a flawed candidate.
The whipping Obama gave Clinton in North Carolina and his near miss in Indiana transformed that impression. The candidate who delivered the victory speech in Raleigh, N.C., was the Obama of Des Moines, bearing no resemblance to the gloomy, uneasy candidate who had seemed unable to deal with bumps in the campaign road. Returning to his eloquent call for unity, the victorious Obama dismissed in advance Republican criticism of his ideology or his past as the same old partisan bickering that the people hate.
John McCain as the Republican candidate does not like that kind of campaigning, either. But a gentlemanly contest between the old war hero from the past and the advocate of reform from the future probably would guarantee a Democratic takeover of the White House. The Republican Party, suffering from public disrepute, is facing major Democratic gains in each house of Congress -- leaving the defeat of Obama as the sole GOP hope for 2008.
Washington Post
Buyer's remorse was beginning to afflict supporters of Barack Obama before Tuesday's primary election returns showed he had delivered a knockout punch against Hillary Clinton. The young orator who had seemed so fantastic, beginning with his 2007 Jefferson-Jackson dinner speech in Iowa, disappointed even his own advisers over the past two weeks, and old party hands mourned that they were stuck with a flawed candidate.
The whipping Obama gave Clinton in North Carolina and his near miss in Indiana transformed that impression. The candidate who delivered the victory speech in Raleigh, N.C., was the Obama of Des Moines, bearing no resemblance to the gloomy, uneasy candidate who had seemed unable to deal with bumps in the campaign road. Returning to his eloquent call for unity, the victorious Obama dismissed in advance Republican criticism of his ideology or his past as the same old partisan bickering that the people hate.
John McCain as the Republican candidate does not like that kind of campaigning, either. But a gentlemanly contest between the old war hero from the past and the advocate of reform from the future probably would guarantee a Democratic takeover of the White House. The Republican Party, suffering from public disrepute, is facing major Democratic gains in each house of Congress -- leaving the defeat of Obama as the sole GOP hope for 2008.
posted by Andy W. Rogers | 9:51 PM
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