Hillary was in Philadelphia today, comparing herself to Rocky, saying that she's not a quitter. "Imagine," she said, "if Rocky had gotten half way up the steps & said "that's far enough.'"

Guess what, Hillary. There was no Rocky Balboa. He was a fictional character. He never really ran up those steps.

This is right out of the Ronald Reagan play book, comparing yourself or your opponents to fictional characters as though they were real. I guess that this makes sense for Hillary. She doesn't seem to know the difference between fiction & reality. Rocky running up the steps. Hillary ducking for cover from sniper fire. What's the diff?

Will it never stop?

Receiving very little attention in coverage of the election in the American media is the view from overseas.

A read of the European press shows that Senator Obama is already enormously popular in Europe. His personal narrative has great appeal there - i.e. his ties to three continents that result form a white Kansas mother, an African father, and his childhood years growing up in Indonesia. He emodies "by his very essense", according to one French journalist, the idea that America has changed and that American foreign policy will change with him.

But it goes deeper than that. The European Union is now a market comparable to the American market. Europeans no longer see themselves as taking a back seat to "the world's only super power". With the re-emergence of Russia and with emerging economies in China & India, it's a new world - one that is both interconnected and interdependent. And the view around the world is that Bush has done great damage with his "go it alone" foreign policy.

Europeans have no problem seeing America as the "first among equals". What they want, however, is coolboration, and especially an America who listens to them. Their view of Barack Obama is that he is a good listener and their view on the other hand of Hillary clinton and John McCain is that they are not. Obama is seen as a keen intleect who wants to understand others and who is not interested in imposing his views on them.

The Bush years have created a disastrous war in the Middle East that threatens the stability of the region and the world, have ignored climate changes resulting from global warming & in so doing have lost valuable time, and have undermined our financial system with world wide implications. As a result, the next president will be faced with military, diplomatic, climate, and financial crises, ano one of whidh could be the major challenge for an administration.

A new president can only hope to have success in meeting these challenges by quickly engaging partners around the world and securing their cooperation. To accomplish this, a president must begin with a new vocabulary which will communicate to our partners that we understand the current global probmes, that we are on a new road, and that we can be trusted.

It is Obama's faciltiy with words and with language that makes him uniquely qualified for this task. Hillary may mock his qualifications as boiling down to "a single speech", but speeches & communicationare the tools of both leadership and diplomacy. Or does she not understand that Barak's ability to communicate is not trivial? Lincoln, Roosevelt, Kennedy, & Reagan each were able to speak to their citizens and to the people of the world generally precisely by virtue of their command of communication & oratorical skills.

The ability of the nest president to reach across the oceans to the international community is a qualification for office that has largely been ignored by an American press that has become conditioned to think only in terms of "cowboy diplomacy" and "troops on the ground".as the tools of foreign relations & conflict resolution in the international community

Because of his skills as a communicator with friend and foe alike, Barack Obama is the man for our time. Just ask the Europeans.

Where did Hillary's campaign go wrong?

She had every advantage going in: a lead in the polls, name recognition, the backing of the most popular Democratic presient in the past 40 years, fund raising, an heir of inevitability. S, how could she lose?

Hillary never gave the voters a reason to vote for her.

With George H. Bush, his problem was "the vision thing." Well, that's been Hillary's problem too. I'm sure that you can come up with the rationale for the Obama, Edwards, or McCain candidacies in a heart beat. In 25 words or less - probably in just a word or two. Ask yourself the rationale for Bill Clinton's campaign: "It's the economy, stupid."

If you had to state the rationale for Hillary's campaign in a nutshell, it would be: "Ready on day one." Unfortunately, that's not a reason to run for president. It may be a fine qualification, but it doesn't tell anyone in the electorate what you want to do on day one. It doesn't say what your vision for the future of America is.

For Reagan, it was: "Morning in America." For Hillary, it has been a laundry list of positions that she has on a variety of issues. Position papers are not a direction in which you want to take the country. They are policy positions for the wonks who want the details to analyze.

The most basic question that any candidate must answer is: "Why do you want to be president?" Hillary never answered that question satisfactorily.

Talking about "35 years of experience" is talk about yourself, not about the country. The electorate doesn't want to know how you see yourself. We want to know how you see us. We want to know where you're going to lead us. 

Without any rationale for it to continue, this campaign is quickly dying.