WEIRDNESS

Posted at 6:24 a.m. ET

Obama and McCain are running dead even, and Obama is starting to show signs of the same stress that dogged him during the final month of his Biblical struggle against Hillary. I know he's in a tough spot, not able to close the deal in a Democratic year, but someone should tell the Illinois senator that weirdness will not help him.  He seems stuck in a kind of time warp - repeating lines over and over that are now obsolete, or have been overtaken by events. 

Consider: 

A confident Barack Obama raised an extraordinary $7.8 million Sunday at three California fundraisers.

“I will win. Don’t worry about that,” he said to the crowd of about 1,300 at his third event of the evening, according to the pool report.

He was warmly received by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who called him "a leader that God has blessed us with at this time."

Add Nancy to the "weirdness" list.  You know, every time they emphasize this Obamamessiah stuff, they drive voters further away. 

Obama spoke, and rambled.  This is not good:

"Now, you want to win. And saying it doesn’t make it so," he told the crowd. "It would be nice to think that after eight years of economic disaster, after eight years of bungled foreign policy, of being engaged in a war that should never have been authorized and should never have been waged, that cost us a trillion dollars and thousands of lives, that people would say, let’s toss the bums out. Toss the bums out, we’re starting from scratch, we’re starting over. This is not working.

“So I understand why a lot of folks are saying, this should just happen. Why are we having to run all these television commercials? Why do we have to raise all this money? Just read the papers. These are the knuckleheads who have been in charge. Throw ‘em out. But American politics aren’t that simple," he said.

Just read it over.  Does that sound like a presidential candidate to you, or does it sound like a Chicago ward healer? 

Things could get ugly in the coming weeks, he warned.

“They’ve got a whole machinery that they’re cranking out,” Obama continued. “They’ve got a book about me, that just kind of sprung full bore out of this guy’s head.”

“John McCain, all he wants to do is talk about me. They know they can’t win on the issues. So what they’ll do is they’ll try to scare people. He’s risky. He’s risky. We’re not sure.”

Do we see in this any specific ideas for governing on the part of Senator Obama?  Is there an idea here?  A program?  Maybe that's what accounts for his drop in the polls.  You can just take so much of this stuff.

It’s an old playbook, he continued, but Obama said, it’s not going to work this time. “Not only do you have a candidate who doesn’t take any guff. Not only do you have a candidate who will hit back swiftly and forcefully and truthfully. But you’ve also got American people who are rising up all over the country and saying, enough is enough.”

What country is this man living in?  He's seen too many of those old Eisenstein Russian-revolution movies.  Rising up?  Do you see rising up?  Are the masses in the streets yet?  Is the proletariat all hot and bothered? 

You just get the feeling of a certain bankruptcy in the Obama campaign.  The rhetoric, free of the inconvenience of thought, just repeats over and over.

The man is leading by one point.  Maybe he's just worn out the sparkle.

August 18, 2008.