Brother Obama

Hillary Clinton is in trouble.

That inevitability of Hillary as the Dem nominee has evaporated.

She seems vulnerable now, but not so much for her flaws and flip flops, her mistakes and her pandering.

It's not that Hillary's stock is tanking. It's more that Barack Obama's is rising.

Dems have had a difficult few weeks with Hillary -- the planted questions, her support of Eliot Spitzer's policy of driver's licenses for illegal immigrants and then her about face, about face, about face. Go back further and consider Norman Hsu and the Chinatown donors.

The far Left Left have been dissatisfied with her stance on Iraq.

Occasionally, Hillary will try to appease the anti-war Left, but it's too little too late.

Last week, Bill Clinton added to Hillary's headaches by claiming that he always was against the war in Iraq, which of course is as flat out a lie as his finger-wagging claim, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky."

Republicans aren't the only ones sickened by the Clintons' crap. When all is said and done, I don't think the Dems want to revisit the Clinton era either. They aren't in the mood for a sequel. She's running on Bill's resume as her own, but I don't think the "Happy Days are Here Again" shtick will work. They want change, something Hillary can't possibly deliver.

Hillary can be "not Bush" but that isn't enough change for a growing number of Dems. They want someone fresh.

Enter Obama.

No wonder he appeals to them--

He's against the war in Iraq and was from the beginning.

He's a big government, big time Lefty.

He's personable, likable.

His name isn't Clinton.

In short, he's all that the Dems wish Hillary would be, yet he isn't what she is.

It has to be troubling to the Clinton camp that the lib media, like that evil Tim Russert, are turning against Hillary and turning to Obama.

Maureen Dowd has taunted Obama for months and months. But even queen of the libs Dowd now seems to have decided its time to get on board and help mythologize Obama.

Her column "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" points out that Obama is gaining momentum. He appeals to people in a way that Hillary can only dream about.

She writes:

He seems more like a child prodigy. Those enraptured with his gifts urge him on, like anxious parents, trying to pull that sustained, dazzling performance out of him that they believe he’s capable of; they are willing to put up with the prodigy’s occasional listlessness and crabbiness, his flights of self-regard and self-righteousness. Despite his uneven efforts and distaste for the claws of competition, they can see he is a golden child, one who moves, speaks, smiles and thinks with amazing grace.

His advisers and fund-raisers have pressed him to go fortissimo. Many voters with great expectations are hovering, hoping for a crescendo.

Except for panicked Clintonistas, everyone seems eager to see if the young pol can live up to his potential. Responding to his more combative style, the press has relaunched him, giving him a second chance to shine, on this week’s cover of Time, in the pages of The New Yorker, in the up arrow of Newsweek, which now declares him “poised to be the comeback kid,” and at The Times, where young female assistants lined the halls on Wednesday to watch him glide into a second meeting with editorial board writers and editors.

In The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan lays out what he sees as Obama’s “indispensable” capacity to move the country past baby-boom feuds and the world past sectarian and racial divides. “It’s November 2008,” he imagines. “A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man — Barack Hussein Obama — is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm.”

In Time, Shelby Steele agrees that a President Obama could show “that race is but a negligible human difference.”

...Obama came to the Apollo Theater in Harlem Thursday night — down the block from Bill Clinton’s office — to try to wrest some support back from the first black president and his wife. Some young Obama fans wore yellow tees reading, “Who decided Hillary is best for the black community?”

...Obama got an introduction from Chris Rock, who warned the audience that “you’d be real embarrassed if he won and you wasn’t down with it. You’d say, ‘Aw, man, I can’t call him now. I had that white lady. What was I thinking?’”

And he got a benediction from Cornel West, the Princeton professor who took Obama to task earlier this year for not attending a national gathering of black scholars and civil rights leaders.

West tried to help Obama in his uneasy quest to claim his place in the black community, calling him “my brother,” “an eloquent brother,” “a good brother” and “a decent brother.” He urged the audience to put Obama in a historical continuum with the spirituals on the plantation and Apollo stars like James Brown and Billie Holiday. Black, he said, has variations. “We don’t expect Alicia Keys to be Aretha,” he said.

As it turns out, Obama is black enough.

Who knew?

...“I’m in this race because I’m tired of reading about Jena,” he said. “I’m tired of reading about nooses. I’m tired of hearing about a Justice Department that doesn’t understand justice. ... I don’t want to wake up four years from now and discover that we still have more young black men in prison than in college.”

As usual, Dowd rambles. However, her point that Obama is a real contender is well-taken.

He's good enough, he's black enough, and doggone it, people like him!

Clearly, Obama was pandering to his audience at the Apollo by talking about "Jena" and the new N-word, "nooses."

He said he’s running because of what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the fierce urgency of now.” Now can the prodigy muster that fierce urgency?

Obama isn't shy about evoking Martin Luther King Jr. when discussing his candidacy. That takes a certain chutzpah.

Dowd wonders whether Obama can live up to the promise. No doubt, Hillary is fearing that more and more people are beginning to believe that he can.