While most analysts agree that Barack Obama will eventually secure his party's presidential nomination, a heated discussion is now taking place in the blogosphere as to whether or not he is still the strongest candidate to go up against Hillary Clinton. Pro-Clinton bloggers are questioning Obama's ability to "close the deal," while conservative bloggers are hoping, and believing, that Obama's recent struggles have revealed him to be a "new Adlai Stevenson" who is popular with the base, but can't win a general election.
Pro-Clinton blogger
Taylor Marsh questions whether Obama has the will to capture the nomination:
The biggest problem Obama has is that he just doesn't seem a tough enough campaigner
to close it out. Sure, he can send around negative mailers and have his talking
heads impugn Clinton in conference calls, which he does. But when it comes to
weighing in himself, it doesn't seem he likes to have his own signature on the
slime he's moving.
National Review's Mark Steyn calls Obama a "novelty candidate" and says Democratic superdelegates have no good option:
There are no good choices for superdelegates right now. But, if you survey the landscape via the pages of the Times, the
Hillary option looks like it comes with more potential for blowback.
The media's over-glamorization of and over-investment in a weak novelty
candidate will influence more calculations than the grim demographic
arithmetic of Pennsylvania.
Not surprisingly, a
Wall Street Journal op-ed from Karl Rove
in which he outlines what he sees as Obama's weaknesses as a candidate
is drawing huge blogger reactions. In Rove's piece he concludes:
Mr. Obama is near victory in the Democratic contest, but it is time for
him to reset, freshen his message and say something new. His conduct in
the last several weeks raises questions about whether, for all his
talents, he is ready to be president.
Reaction to the Rove piece after the jump...
Pro-Obama blogger
Andrew Sullivan says Rove and Clinton are of the same ilk:
The great clarifier of this primary season has been the in-gathering of
most of the most toxic, cynical forces in American politics - Democrat
and Republican - to extinguish the Obama campaign. In the end, Rove and
Clinton are in the same party (Washington, Inc.) and play by the same
rules (whatever they can say they are at any given moment). But they're
losing. And this head-game is pretty much their last gambit.
Hot Air's
Ed Morrissey agrees with Rove's assertion that Obama has accomplished little:
In short, Obama has run as something he clearly is not, at least not so
far. He wants people to believe that he can change the game, but in the
three short years he has served in national office, he has done nothing
to suggest that. John McCain actually has a track record of working
across party divisions and trying to reach solutions on controversial
issues; Barack Obama prefers to reserve his “political capital”. All
Obama has done is talk about change, and that talk has begun to wear
thin, especially as people take a closer look at him and his political
associations.
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