Questions about Obama's "electability" never fail to raise our hackles and we go beserk in his defense. We feel an intense connection to his person and his message and disagree viscerally with his critics.

I want to blog this, however, from my head rather than my heart - despite being ahead in delegates, Obama is still not winning significantly more than half of the electorate, and that's just the Democratic primary.

If we really want him to win the White House, we have to face up to his weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and Obama has a little time from now till November to address them.

He has to be unblinkered, objective and brutally honest in assessing himself and his opponents, both strengths and weaknesses.

It means he has to win over those who have not voted for him, and who do not plan to. Not us. The ones who are concerned that rightly or wrongly, he doesn't love his country enough, that he may be an elite out-of-touch snob, that he is an inexperienced empty suit.

That's been Hillary's fatal flaw - instead of wooing the Obama voters, her campaign insults, dimisses and derides them. It's her Achilles heel since the days of "Screw 'em!" to Southern Democratic voters who turned Republican. This is a mistake we must learn from - although we won't win over all the ones voting for Hillary or McCain, many are blinded beyond redemption (about 29% from the looks of Bush's approval ratings), we must win *enough* of them over.

How can Obama win them over without pandering like a phony cardboard butter fingered bowler or Royal Crown-in-the-ass duck hunter?

All those millions spent on ad blitzes that saturate and blanket airtime prove limited in their opinion-changing effectiveness.

He has to remain authentic and truthful but it is time he talks about all these other things that the other half of America are concerned about.

He certainly has to change his message, and if we care enough about sending him to the White House, we have to accept that his campaign might change its tone or direction. He has to prove himself to all these other groups by articulating his vision in a way that includes them.

Someone as empathetic as him would be able to reach out and speak to them without condescension, that I'm assured of.

I first thought of this because of a Peggy Noonan column blogged by PaDem:

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/2008/04/obama-and-america-is-there-a-p.php

Let's be open-minded to constructive criticism and good advice about what the other half of the electorate think and feel.

Instead of getting mad at Hillary, let's learn our lessons well from her. The ABC debate was a horrible debacle, but it served the function of exposing all the potential vulnerabilities to be addressed.

I saw a link to this article from Obama's Watchdogs' site about a reporter going undercover as a campaign volunteer in Philly. I'm convinced she'll move on to conquer mountains with such awe-inspiring presence, deft maneuvring, uplifting messages, sweeping organizational skills. Have a latte, enjoy!

http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2008/04/17/i-was-a-clinton-volunteer

Yes, you. You who have done the math. You who have read the polls. You who have crowed about Hillary's debt and her money drying up. You who believe that no one dares overturn the electoral process. You who believe that it doesn't matter as long as a Democrat is in the White House. You who have blogged that it's over, Obama won.

It's NOT over. The math didn't help when the George Bush beat Al Gore in Florida 2000. The polls didn't mean a damn thing when Kerry lost Ohio. The money will *never* dry up for Hillary because no ordinary person earns $109 million by writing a couple of boooks and giving speeches. And after all these months of seeing Hillary's true character, I hope you're not stupid enough to think that there isn't any discernible difference between the two presidential candidates.

Hillary is counting on all the chilled-out Obama supporters like you who believe that he'll sail into the Convention and onto November on the back of pledged delegates, Youtube videos and 35,000 people rallies.

Wake up. The Clintons are fighting for their lives - the ones who gave them all these hundreds of millions of $$$ knew they have their backs. Knives will be out for them should they fail to deliver the White House to them.

Think Whitewater, cattle futures, the Telecoms Act, the repeal of Glass-Steagall, Hillary's voting for the bankruptcy laws, Chelsea working for hedge funds. Money drives the Clintons, as it does the Bushes.

Their life-long friend Robert Reich, offered in a telling quip:

Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who first introduced the couple at Yale but who has been disillusioned with them for some time, is one of several former associates who described their current circle as mostly money people: "The world for them tends to be divided between those who are useful to them, financially or politically or both, and those who aren't. So many of their friends are accordingly very wealthy, and they associate informally with a fairly wide circle of extremely wealthy people."

http://www.slate.com/id/2188751/pagenum/2

That's what you get with dynastic families - the succession ensures that vital interests and stakes of their elite friends are preserved.

We have no idea what we're up against.

It's going to get much, much uglier. If you don't fight for the democratic process now, we might as well "chill" and wait for another 8 years. That's what we latte drinkers are good at, "chill", or we can go out there and make our voices heard.

He must have known it was a trap. Hillary grinning like a Chelsire cat and looking like she knows what ordeals lie ahead, and George Stephanopoulus, the indentured Bill Clinton apparatchik and media hitman, flanking his vision. The ratings have gone through the roof, the world is watching. The bear baiting starts, the bloodiest political inquisition this season unfolds in tortuous slo-mo, as one by one, the feared sadistic political contraptions - flagpins, Terrorist, Wright, 9/11 - are trotted out. 

Like most of you, I could feel my anger welling up like a percolating volcano. The torrent of letters, emails, calls to ABC, the MSM and blogosphere all attest to the collective revulsion. Amidst the uproar, a slew of reviews unanimously panning Obama's tepid, deflated performance and handing the trophy to Hillary suggest that he's lost this battle. Is he frail and vulnerable after all? Can he withstand the onslaught of McCain the White and the Republican Orgs this November?

It slowly dawns on me that Obama may have lost this battle and the ratings but won the war. By taking it on the chin to the point where it becomes too painful for *us* to watch, eliciting nausea (someone blogged about throwing up@), turning most of us physically ill, we, the audience, start screaming for this Rovian-boarding to stop.

If this was Obama's strategy all along, it has to be bloody brilliant. Had he spoken out early and forcefully to cut this line of attack short, he would have won hearty cheers and applause, but nary a commendation and certainly not a nation-wide outrage like we're witnessing now. And Hillary can boast smugly about her impenetrable skin, "rifled baggage" and repetitious Republican "vetting". 

As the protests well to a tsunami, it not only makes Hillary look like Rumsfeld in drag, Rove is probably breaking out in cold clammy sweat at the outpouring of unchained, stinging voter bitterness. Limbaugh, seized by uncontrollable paroxysms, downs fistfuls of valium. Has McCain put out word he's shopping for new campaign advisors yet?

The talk is now about "Gotcha!" politics as voters, sick of the dirt-mongering, demand that the candidates, media and the debates turn to *issues*, and of course Obama is ready there for them.

This is not only designed for a Hillary Clinton knock-out, it's a pre-emptive strike against his much more formidable and unscrupulous foes in November, all by not lifting a finger, yet the plates are shifting.

We are a gathering storm demanding accountability from the political and media elite, let's not rest, but press on, summoning fellow voters to raise voices in unison, lest the ailing country succumbs to more of the same toxic political filth.

Obama may be Taoist, even if he might not have heard of the Way. In a Taoist story I recounted on another blog,
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/2008/04/my-82-year-old-mothers-debate.php
Cook Ting, a master of the knife said, "A good cook changes his knife once a year - because he cuts. A mediocre cook changes his knife once a month - because he hacks...However, whenever I come to a complicated place, I size up the difficulties, tell myself to watch out and be careful, keep my eyes on what I'm doing, work very slowly, and move the knife with the greatest of subtlety, until -flop! The whole thing comes apart like a clod of earth crumbling to the ground. I stand there holding the knife and look all around me, completely satisfied and reluctant to move on, and then I wipe off the knife and put it away."
... This principle of seeing the overall structure, seeing the way of least resistance and then using the least effort for the maximum returns, leads ultimately to the principle of wu wei, which can be translated as 'inaction', 'not doing' or 'not striving'.

A fellow poster, Slouch, summed up with quotes from the Tao Te Ching 36:

If you want to shrink something, you must first allow it to expand. If you want to get rid of something, you must first allow it to flourish. If you want to take something, you must first allow it to be given. This is called the subtle perception of the way things are.
The soft overcomes the hard.
The slow overcomes the fast.
Let your workings remain a mystery.
Just show people the results.