How Obama Lost The Election -- Interesting Perspective From Asia Times

By: SW

Photo: The DNC Convention Finale

Just come across this Sept 3 article from a reporter for the Asia Times (http://www.atimes.com/) who were at the Denver DNC convention. Asia Times is a prominent magazine published in Hong Kong. It actually published a daily newspaper in Hong Kong and in Thailand until the Asian financial crisis in 1997. Now it only publishes on-line, and its target readers are educated and professional people in Asia.

The entire article can be read at http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/JI03Aa02.html . Some insightful excerpts from the article as follows:

Melancholy hung like thick smog over the reserved seats where I sat with Democratic Party staffers. The crowd, of course, cheered mechanically at the tag lines, flourished placards, and even rose for the obligatory wave around the stadium. But its mood was sour. The air carried the acrid smell of defeat, and the crowd took shallow breaths. Even the appearance of R&B great Stevie Wonder failed to get the blood pumping.

On television, Obama's spectacle might have looked like The Ten Commandments, but inside the stadium it felt like Night of the Living Dead. The longer the candidate spoke, and the more money he promised to spend on alternative energy, preschool education, universal health care, and other components of the Democratic pinata, the lower the party professionals slouched into their seats. The professionals I sat with were Hillary Clinton people, to be sure, and had reason to sulk, for an Obama victory might do them little good in any event.

Obama will spend the rest of his life wondering why he rejected the obvious road to victory, that is, choosing Hillary Clinton as his vice presidential nominee. .....McCain's choice of vice presidential candidate made obvious after the fact what the party professionals felt in their fingertips at the stadium extravaganza yesterday: rejecting Clinton in favor of the colorless, unpopular, tangle-tongued Washington perennial Joe Biden was a statement of weakness......America's voters will forgive many things in a politician, including sexual misconduct, but they will not forgive weakness.

That is why McCain will win in November, and by a landslide, barring some unforeseen event.

According to Obama sources, those public utterances do not reveal the extent of her hostility," Novak wrote. If that is true, then Obama succumbed to the character weakness I described in a February 26 profile of (Obama's women reveal his secret). His peculiar dependency on an assertive and often rancorous spouse, I argued, made him vulnerable, and predicted that Obama "will destroy himself before he destroys the country"

If Palin is unqualified to be vice president, all the less so is Obama qualified to be president.

Obama, in short, is long on brains and short on guts.....Obama could have allied with the old guard, through an Obama-Clinton ticket, or he could have rejected the old guard by choosing the closest thing the Democrats had to a Sarah Palin. But fear paralyzed him, and he did neither.

By all rights, the Democrats should win this election. They will lose, I predict, because of the flawed character of their candidate.