Robert Stacy McCain of the American Spectator asks "is Obama another classic Democratic blunder?
  • Somewhere, there should be a Hall of Fame honoring profoundly stupid Democratic Party campaign ideas. Among the featured exhibits would be Michael Dukakis's 1988 tank ride and John Kerry's 2004 Ohio duck-hunting trip. ("Can I get me a hunting license here?")

    The important thing to remember about such classic campaign blunders, however, is that Democrats didn't realize their disastrous potential until it was too late to prevent them.

    Whether it's George McGovern's choice of Thomas Eagleton as his 1972 running mate or Fritz Mondale's promise to raise taxes in 1984, for some reason there's never anybody around Democrat HQ with the foresight to shout an advance warning.
    • Writing at the Huffington Post, Hillary Clinton supporter Larry Johnson declared on Feb. 16 that Obama's association with former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers "will be Barack Obama's Willie Horton."
    • On March 13, ABC News was the first major media outlet to report on the anti-American rants of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the pastor of Obama's Trinty Church in Chicago, igniting a controversy that continued to make headlines for weeks.
    • On April 7, Christopher Hitchens noted that Obama had named a radical Catholic priest, the Rev. Michael Pfleger, among his religious "mentors," and that Pfleger had defended Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. On May 25, Pfleger preached a bizarre sermon at Trinity church, mocking Hillary as an advocate of "white entitlement," resulting in a YouTube video clip that quickly went viral -- like the plague -- on the Internet.
    • Obama's connection to corrupt Chicago Democratic fund-raiser Tony Rezko was widely reported by major media. In January, for example, ABC News reported that Rezko and his associates had "contributed more than $120,000 to Obama's 2004 campaign for the U.S. Senate, much of it at a time when Rezko was the target of an FBI investigation."
  • His scandalous associations didn't stop Obama from squeaking past Hillary to clinch the Democratic nomination, but his responses to these controversies so far -- such as first "distancing" himself from Wright, then finally quitting the Trinity congregation -- are unlikely to immunize him from further scrutiny in the general-election campaign.

    Even the manner in which Obama won the nomination suggests that he may prove an unusually weak candidate in the general election.

    ALL OF OBAMA'S problems would be enough to worry Democrats if he were a veteran politician, but he's not. He's a 46-year-old former state legislator who was only elected to the Senate in 2004 and whose presidential candidacy got an artificial boost from media enthusiasts like Oprah Winfrey and Chris Matthews.

    Obama's nomination is part of a pattern of Democrats preferring "fresh new faces" as their presidential candidates. McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Dukakis and Bill Clinton all won the nomination on their first attempts.

    By contrast, Republicans have tended toward the "it's his turn" approach to their White House candidates. Excluding only vice president Richard Nixon's 1960 campaign and the historical anomaly of Gerald Ford, George W. Bush was the first GOP presidential candidate since Dwight Eisenhower to get the Republican nomination on his first try.

    the "it's his turn" approach means that McCain is already a familiar character to independent swing voters, who typically pay less attention to politics than do avid partisans of either party. Such scandals as his membership in the "Keating Five" are all old news, and it's unlikely the fall campaign will produce any shocking revelations about the Republican. Democrats can't say the same about the untested Obama.