Obama Outgunned at Saddleback Showdown

What Harold Kildow calls Rick Warren's "Saddleback Showdown" was in effect the kickoff to the 2008 campaign ("The Law Professor vs. the Fighter Pilot"). Kildow reflects on how galling this must be to the journalistic establishment since none of them were involved.


Rich Lowry has a nice account if you missed it.

"McCain sounded like a potential president, Obama more like a potential therapist, seeing all sides and offering them the balm of his thoughtfulness and verbal acuity. He looked very young and slender. It was almost as if Democrats had gone from merely appealing to graduate students to nominating one."

Michael Gerson is also very good. "Mr. Obama is one of those rare political figures who seems to grow smaller the closer we approach him."

In general, it has been a back week or so for Barack Obama. That is to say, as in the Wizard of Oz, the curtain has been pulled back and we have seen a very small, ineffectual man behind the media generated illusion.

Read Dick Morris and Eileen McGann's insightful column on Obama's apparently woeful inadequacy in dealing with tough opponents and judging politically complex situations ("Obama's Backbone Deficit").

"Last week raised important questions about whether Barack Obama is strong enough to be president. On the domestic political front, he showed incredible weakness in dealing with the Clintons, while on foreign and defense questions, he betrayed a lack of strength and resolve in standing up to Russia's invasion of Georgia. This two-dimensional portrait of weakness underscores fears that Obama might, indeed, be a latter-day Jimmy Carter."
"We know so little about Obama. His experience is so thin that it's hard to tell what kind of a president he'd be. While he nominally has been in the Senate for four years, he really only served the first two and consumed the rest of his tenure running for president and disregarding his Senate duties. So we have no choice but to scrutinize his current transactions and statements for some clue as to who he is and what he'd do. In that context, his reaction to the first real-time foreign-policy crisis he faced as a nominee leaves his strength in doubt. So does his palsied response to the Clintons' attempt to make Denver a Clinton convention."
Bambi indeed. Read the whole thing.
Michael Barone in "Echoes of Berlin Olympics" shines in his analysis of th Georgian invasion, Obama's shortcomings, the larger geo-political issues, and the challenges these now present for America.
"Senator McCain has taken a strong stand from the start. His statement, "We are all Georgians," echoes John F. Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner." Senator Obama, after a weak opening statement, has also condemned the Russian actions. But his own speech before the Prussian Victory Column in Berlin showed an incomplete appreciation of history. He hailed the Berlin airlift as an example of American generosity, which it was. But he didn't note that it was an example of American military strength: The "candy bombers" were members of the U.S. Air Force. And when he celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall, he said it was supported by "the world as one." But a lot of people — communists — built the Berlin Wall, supported the Berlin Wall, and shot men who attempted to climb over the Berlin Wall to freedom."