Obama’s Existential Crisis

Last week in one fell swoop, John McCain completely changed the dynamic of this presidential election — this campaign is no longer a referendum on Barack Obama. If events of the past few days are any indication, this paradigm shift has caused a staggering existential crisis for Obama and his supporters.

The Democratic Party gamble in this election was hedged on a bet that the Obama campaign could maintain the media’s focus and the electorate’s attention on “The One” to divert attention from all of his attached inside-the-Beltway strings. That illusion has been shattered. For the first time in this campaign, Obama is playing catch-up.

Senator McCain has responded by going all in with Gov. Sarah Palin. Instead of a promise of future change and breaking with politics as usual, McCain has delivered it. The desperation on Obama’s part is evident today as the headlines are about his comments that he really is more experienced than her — the very discussion that Obama and his supporters had desperately hoped to avoid.

In his selection of Gov. Palin, McCain has exposed what was perhaps Obama’s greatest weakness, namely how the Obama project has really been a last-ditch attempt by Democrats to extend the miserable life of the New Deal/Great Society Democratic Party — the very bloated big government model they have pushed with the past three candidates: Al Gore, John Kerry, and now Barack Obama. Can anyone really tell the difference between these political triplets?

Make no mistake; Democrats are frantic now that the man behind the curtain has been revealed. Despite their shameless attempt to mask their plans behind identity politics, the Obama campaign has always been about big government liberalism, labor union dinosaurs, and K Street fat-cat lobbyists — Washington politics as usual. America saw this with his vice-presidential pick, Joe Biden.

It was obvious that the Biden selection was about bootstrapping Barack Obama’s very meager political credentials, but what this pick really represented was entrenching the Washington, DC, of yesterday and today, not a reform platform for tomorrow. Biden was an audible to the Democratic Party’s base that there would be plenty of room for all the snouts at the tax trough. Does anyone really believe that there will be substantive personnel and policy changes in an Obama administration? John McCain, however, has craftily exposed how Obama’s narrative about change and the future have been a farce. Joe Biden is now a dead weight on the Democratic ticket, and no doubt Obama and the Democrats are having some buyer’s remorse.

What is also causing existential angst for the Obama campaign today is that the experience of both John McCain and Sarah Palin are the antithesis of Barack Obama and Joe Biden. McCain the Maverick is back, rested and ready, having been in political exile since 2000. And he is joined by Sarah Palin, who has energized the GOP base unlike any other political figure since Ronald Reagan. She personifies an amazing mixture of diverse and seemingly contradictory interests: leave-us-along libertarianism and Bible-clinging evangelicalism. She is the big-tent GOP as Lee Atwater envisioned it. And her real-world existence of bringing home the bacon and frying it up in the pan immediately strikes a chord with families all across the country having to do the same — except Sarah Palin hunts down the boar before bringing home the bacon.

Meanwhile, Obama’s public image has suddenly begun to revert from the carefully choreographed caricature of the bike-riding savior of the planet to the more candid and accurate picture of the Chicago political machine operative with the cigarette hanging out of his mouth.

The Obama-Biden campaign also understands that the McCain-Palin ticket is not without nostalgia of its own. This pair embodies the American pioneering spirit. They represent flyover country, the real America that most Americans live in beyond the media and financial center of New York, the political center of Washington, and the mind-numbing popular culture of Hollywood. While McCain-Palin represent the Wild West and the untamed frontier, Obama-Biden’s support comes from the big cities crammed with all of America’s social ills. Could the contrast between McCain-Palin and Obama-Biden be any starker?

Another gauge of the crisis inside the Obama camp is how his cheerleaders have come absolutely unhinged as the psychological strain of the Left having to appear mainstream is beginning to show. The smears that came out last weekend got their campaign way off message. Whether it has been Andrew Sullivan telling us that Sarah Palin recently gave birth to Elvis’ love child, or the lunatics at the Daily Kos asylum trolling the internet for pictures of her having tea with Adolf Hitler, the tight rein that Obama had kept on his smear merchants has suddenly been loosed, exposing to the world the company he keeps — including his Weather Underground terrorist friend, William Ayers. The meltdown has extended to the establishment media as well, with MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann sent on a timeout to cover Hurricane Gustav.

There is much in the McCain-Palin ticket for Obama to worry about. The existential crisis for Democrats is that this campaign is no longer about Barack Obama. It really is about the vision that Americans have for the future, and Americans are now able to envision a future without “The One.” Reality has set in on the Democratic Party and they realize they no longer have control of the public narrative or the political momentum. In a pair of authentic mavericks and challenge-the-system reformers, America is starting to see herself and her highest hopes again.