Obama's Recovery?

Never mind the headline, the Post reports nerves among the Democratic insiders. Everything's fine, reports Campaign Obama. Meanwhile the Times reports they're fundraising could be behind budget. The top of their ticket is calling the bottom of McCain's ticket a "pig", and the critique of McCain's claim to "change" has a plaintive tone. It doesn't look like Candidate Obama can take a punch.

Why not, and how well he recover?

The Palin nomination is working because it draws attention to McCain's reform agenda, and because that agenda gains credibility under scrutiny. He's done hard things, he's bucked his party and heroes, he's crossed the aisle to get things done. Dumb things, sometimes, but he's no partisan. The Palin pick shows those who know him that he's serious about this stuff. Those who don't know him are intrigued by the pick, look to see if McCain's reform agenda is for real, and find a biography and record testify to his seriousness. She doesn't validate him, or at least not beyond a certain point, but she grabs people's attention, and he can make the sale from there. She makes it obvious that he isn't Bush-Cheney III, and she makes the "out of touch" charges ridiculous. With her help, McCain is making a strong case for the Presidency.

Obama isn't. He has "programs", but they're complicated, and people are generally suspicious of government even if they're the supposed beneficiaries. His blend of change is Democratic policies rather than Republican, which is fine but doesn't address any fundamental problem with Washington. Is Harry Reid really that much better than Bill Frist? Is Nancy Pelosi truly different than whoever the GOP had as Speaker? The argument that he is actually more of the same is not implausible.

Perhaps Obama's candidacy was never that strong to begin with. He was fresh and exciting as a black politician who didn't play to a black base, and as a Democrat making a studied effort to speak to people of faith, and as someone who wasn't attached to the partisan battles of the past. Obama looked like change among traditional Democratic alternatives -- but even then, he won the nomination in part by better organization and careful optimization of return on efforts through a strategic focus on caucus voters. A win is a win, but such a win signals less popular appeal than a win based on decisive margins in large primaries. As a Generic Democrat facing a Generic Republican, he looked pretty good, especially since the electorate is rightly and deeply disgusted with Republicans these days.

But the Palin pick took the perception of McCain out of the Generic Republican box. It's less clear that Obama knows what to do against John McCain, as opposed to Generic Republican. His campaign was essentially founded on a rejection of George Bush. Now that McCain has decisively escaped that identification with Bush, Obama needs a new plan. Looking at his campaign, I don't see what that will be.

(The 9/11 appearance won't help, either. I first thought it would hurt McCain, by suggesting parity in their opposition to terrorism. But it does emphasize foreign policy, turf where McCain compares well. And it shows McCain reaching out to build consensus there, a crucial and ugly failing of the Bush Administration. His effort here will underline the differences in his approach from Bush's -- further complicating Obama's effort to collapse the two.

(McCain doesn't have a great reputation as a strategist, but he sure seems to be playing this game awfully well lately.)