Obama’s problem is that his campaign runs on inertia. That is one of the two great Newtownian forces. It is the vested expectation in his success as a phenomenon that brings people to him. Bandwagoning stops working the first time the parade stalls. Obama assumed that inertia meant that his prior advancement meant that his future moves could not be stopped, even without any more to justify it than the initial networking and fundraising. That was what Hillary damned as the “speech in 2002.”

The other force of nature Obama can’t control is entropy. Energy dissipates and control is lost. Without meaningful content to justify and reenergize your object becomes just one of millions of competing egos with no special claim or precedence. The natural tendency is for unpredictable and unscripted events to impede the linear flow of history needed to elevate Obama. Entropy and Inertia mean that in the real world movements like Obama’s tend to go to Hell and stay there.