I began an earlier post asking, "Who is this Barack Hussein Obama?" ("Obama is All About Obama.") Today, Peggy Noonan, always gracious and judicious, sees Obama losing in November because the American electorate, that broad middle, is asking the same question and coming up with a blank. David Brooks ("Where's The Landslide?") ventured down this road in search of an explanation for why The One We Have Been Waiting For is stalling and rolling backwards.

In "They're Paying Attention Now" (Wall Street Journal, Aug. 22, 2008), Peggy presents the American mind this way:

It's hard for our political class to remember that Mr. Obama has been famous in America only since the winter of '08. America met him barely six months ago!...This is what they see: An attractive, intelligent man, interesting, but—he's hard to categorize. Is he Gen. Obama? No, no military background. Brilliant Businessman Obama? No, he never worked in business. Famous Name Obama? No, it's a new name, an unusual one. Longtime Southern Governor Obama? No. He's a community organizer (what's that?), then a lawyer (boo), then a state legislator (so what, so's my cousin), then U.S. senator (less than four years!). There is no pre-existing category for him. Add to that the wear and tear of Jeremiah Wright, secret Muslim rumors, media darling and, this week, abortion. It took a toll, which led to a readjustment. His uniqueness, once his great power, is now his great problem.

And over there is Mr. McCain, and—well, we know him. He's POW/senator/prickly, irritating John McCain.

Under those conditions, how can someone win election to the American presidency?

Great post over at American Thinker. (J. R. Dunn, "The Odd Choices in Barack Obama's Career.")

Barack Obama will be defeated. Seriously and convincingly defeated....He will lose for one reason above all, one that has been overlooked in any analysis that I've yet seen. Barack Obama will lose because he is a flake.... A flake is not only a screwup, but someone who truly excels in making bizarre errors and creating incredibly convoluted disasters. A flake is a "fool with energy", as the Russian proverb puts it. ("A fool is a terrible thing to have around, but a fool with energy is a nightmare".)...The chief characteristic of a flake is that he makes choices that are impossible to either understand or explain....The flake has a genius for discovering solutions at perfect right angles to the ordinary world. It's as if he's the product of a totally different evolutionary chain, in a universe where the laws are slightly but distinctly at variance to ours....And although there's plenty of rationalization, there's never a logical reason for any of it. After awhile, people stop asking.

Dunn's post is a catalog of the bizarre.

• Though he hales from the heavenly land of Hawaii, he relocates to windy, cold and corrupt Chicago.
• In Chicago, he joins a cult.
• At Harvard, though editor of the Harvard Law Review, he publishes nothing.
• In the Illinois state senate, he votes "present" as often as he votes "yes" or "no." Dunn adds that you can't vote "present" in the Oval Office. Ouch!
  
• After serving in the U.S. Senate only 143 days, he launches a bid for the White House.

Dunn then examines several bizarre mishandlings that have pummeled the campaign into its present malaise. (Yes, a Jimmy Carter word is appropriate here.)

• His extended non-response to the Jeremiah Wright affair.
• His response to the New Yorker cover.
• His handling of the birth certificate saga.
• His response to Jerome Corsi's book, The Obama Nation.
• His self-description in Europe as "citizen of the world."
• His agreement to devote most of his convention next week to the Clintons.

Dunn foresees evidence of Obama's flakery on national display for the next three months. Read it. It's a gem.

It was a dangerous world when the Democrats and Republicans settled on their choices for presidential nominees. It is now an even more dangerous world.

Russia is threatening Poland with nuclear attack. If Poland deploys the defensive missile shield we have agreed to supply them, Russia will target them with nuclear weapons. In the event of a conflict, Poland would be a priority target.

The bear has come out of hibernation. He's hungry. He's angry. And he's feeling his strength. In a post as tribute to Reagan's ad man, Hal Riney, when he died this year, I gave you a link to his 1984 ad, "A Bear in the Woods." It's worth viewing again.

There is a bear in the woods.
For some people the bear is easy to see.
Others don't see it at all.
Some people say the bear is tame.
Others say it's vicious...and dangerous.
Since no one can be really sure who's right, isn't it smart to be as strong as the bear...if there is a bear.

Closer to home, Iran is developing plans to launch a nuclear armed Scud missile from a trawler off the American coast with a view to detonating the device over the United States, sending an EMP (electro-magnetic pulse) across the country frying electronic circuitry everywhere. This is the report from Dr William Graham, former White House science adviser under President Ronald Reagan, to a Claremont Institute conference on missile defense. “An EMP attack on America would send us back to the horse and buggy era — without the horse and buggy,” said Rep. Trent Franks, R, Ariz. Read all the frightening details.

But Barack Obama is more concerned about disarming the country than about doing whatever is necessary to protect it, including space based missile defense that could protect us from this sort of plot. He explains it himself in this video.

This is no game for the unpracticed.

What Harold Kildow calls Rick Warren's "Saddleback Showdown" was in effect the kickoff to the 2008 campaign ("The Law Professor vs. the Fighter Pilot"). Kildow reflects on how galling this must be to the journalistic establishment since none of them were involved.

"Obama's answers, as always, show him looking both ways, calibrating, adjusting, his mind racing ahead in those frequent silences and stutterings, to gauge the sound of what he is about to say so as to preserve his self-presentation as a blank canvas, upon which each hearer can project his own meaning--the essence of postmodern hermeneutics. ... If Rick Warren's obvious and elegant model for public discussion becomes the default, the Democrats will be the losers. The vacuity of the lofty and fanciful fictions Obama has been peddling does not compare favorably to the solidity of the feet on the ground grittiness offered by McCain. The affectations of the law professor look lightweight and unaffordable when contrasted so directly to the leadership quotient of the fighter pilot."

Rich Lowry has a nice account if you missed it.

"McCain sounded like a potential president, Obama more like a potential therapist, seeing all sides and offering them the balm of his thoughtfulness and verbal acuity. He looked very young and slender. It was almost as if Democrats had gone from merely appealing to graduate students to nominating one."

Michael Gerson is also very good. "Mr. Obama is one of those rare political figures who seems to grow smaller the closer we approach him."

In general, it has been a back week or so for Barack Obama. That is to say, as in the Wizard of Oz, the curtain has been pulled back and we have seen a very small, ineffectual man behind the media generated illusion.

Read Dick Morris and Eileen McGann's insightful column on Obama's apparently woeful inadequacy in dealing with tough opponents and judging politically complex situations ("Obama's Backbone Deficit").

"Last week raised important questions about whether Barack Obama is strong enough to be president. On the domestic political front, he showed incredible weakness in dealing with the Clintons, while on foreign and defense questions, he betrayed a lack of strength and resolve in standing up to Russia's invasion of Georgia. This two-dimensional portrait of weakness underscores fears that Obama might, indeed, be a latter-day Jimmy Carter."

"We know so little about Obama. His experience is so thin that it's hard to tell what kind of a president he'd be. While he nominally has been in the Senate for four years, he really only served the first two and consumed the rest of his tenure running for president and disregarding his Senate duties. So we have no choice but to scrutinize his current transactions and statements for some clue as to who he is and what he'd do. In that context, his reaction to the first real-time foreign-policy crisis he faced as a nominee leaves his strength in doubt. So does his palsied response to the Clintons' attempt to make Denver a Clinton convention."

Bambi indeed. Read the whole thing.

Michael Barone in "Echoes of Berlin Olympics" shines in his analysis of th Georgian invasion, Obama's shortcomings, the larger geo-political issues, and the challenges these now present for America.

"Senator McCain has taken a strong stand from the start. His statement, "We are all Georgians," echoes John F. Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner." Senator Obama, after a weak opening statement, has also condemned the Russian actions. But his own speech before the Prussian Victory Column in Berlin showed an incomplete appreciation of history. He hailed the Berlin airlift as an example of American generosity, which it was. But he didn't note that it was an example of American military strength: The "candy bombers" were members of the U.S. Air Force. And when he celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall, he said it was supported by "the world as one." But a lot of people — communists — built the Berlin Wall, supported the Berlin Wall, and shot men who attempted to climb over the Berlin Wall to freedom."

John McCain seems suddenly Churchillian. Consider the resemblance. Both men came from a long line of public men, albeit of different sorts. Both distinguished themselves militarily when young, although differently. Both spent years in the legislature and in leadership positions there, Churchill as Home Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer and McCain as a prominent member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. If McCain is elected president, both will have come very late in life to executive leadership of their respective nations. Churchill was 65 when he became Prime Minister in 1940. John McCain will be 72 at the end of this month.

More substantively, both men were fairly isolated even within their own parties in their prescient opposition to looming tyranny in Europe. At a joint press conference in Slovenia with then Russian President Putin, President George W. Bush said "I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country." In disagreement with this, Sen. McCain said "When I look into Vladimir Putin's eyes, I see three letters: a K, a G and a B." He has been advocating the expulsion of Russian from the G8 group of industrialized nations, a suggestion that obviously most have found unnecessarily provocative. Now if McCain had Obama's eloquence, the resemblance would be more convincing.

But Americans are not moved by associations with Winston Churchill. But events have opened the opportunity for McCain to step into the Reagan role. And his penchant for prudent confrontation with the Russians, despite fierce opposition from the Democrats, is Reaganesque. Putin's making explicit his imperial ambitions in Europe may clinch the election for McCain. Anything that reminds America that we are living in a dangerous world is a boost for McCain and daybreak to the Obama dream-sleep.

George Will recently reminded us of this great quip from a less than great British PM: "Asked in 1957 what would determine his government's course, Harold Macmillan, Britain's new prime minister, replied, 'Events, dear boy, events.'"

Many of us who follow political developments have been aware that the dynamics of the American presidential election could be radically changed if al Qaeda or Iran were to shake up world affairs. As with Bill Clinton in 1992, Obama's push for the White House depends on either a prevailing peace or a peace that ought to be. Now the Russian bear has started gnawing into the juicy little Republic of Georgia.

Suddenly Barack Obama's European concert tour looks especially silly, and the Democratic candidate resembles a little boy who has been playing fireman behind the wheel of a hook and ladder when suddenly the alarm sounds, and the man of flame-tested crisis experience lifts him aside and takes command. John McCain looks more the Commander-in-Chief now than he ever did.

Moreover, whereas McCain once seemed like the best we could come up with in this odd primary season, now he seems like the right man for the critical juncture in world history. The Russian invasion of Georgia may well be one of the most significant events of the twenty-first century, comparable to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland in 1936 and Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech in 1946 in response to Soviet activity in Eastern Europe. As the depth of the danger sinks in, Americans will ask themselves who the best man (or woman; that question's not settled yet) for the job is in its new dimensions.

This Russian imperial (what the Wall Street Journal calls "Bonapartist") land grab in Georgia is reminiscent of so many sad histories. In 1918, Imperial Germany lay prostrate after defeat in World war I. Less than 20 years later, Hitler's Third Reich annexed the Sudetenland in neighboring Czechoslovakia. And of course it did not end there. In 1990, the great Soviet Union, the mother of world communism, collapsed and its empire shattered across eastern Europe. Now, not even 20 years later, the bear is beginning to devour poor Europe again. Will the response in the West be any different?

I anticipate that President Bush will issue a declaration similar to that which his father issued after Saddam Hussein swallowed Kuwait. "This aggression will not stand." (He was provoked to this by Margaret Thatcher who, in a PBS interview, said "Aggressors must be stopped. Not only stopped, they must be thrown out!") Of course, expelling Russia is trickier business than expelling Saddam.

Now we see the different foreign policy approaches of the two candidates put to the test in real life crisis. Read John McCain's statement in response to the invasion.

He says, "Russian aggression against Georgia is both a matter of urgent moral and strategic importance to the United States of America."

He made sure to mention his personal familiarity with the situation. "I've met with President Saakashvili many times, including during several trips to Georgia."

Whereas Obama recently traveled through Europe "playing" president and talking about tearing down all sorts of metaphorical "walls," McCain draws our attention to a wall that could reappear in Europe if we mishandle these events. "Russia is using violence against Georgia, in part, to intimidate other neighbors - such as Ukraine - for choosing to associate with the West and adhering to Western political and economic values. As such, the fate of Georgia should be of grave concern to Americans and all people who welcomed the end of a divided of Europe, and the independence of former Soviet republics."

His plan is this:

• The United States and our allies should continue efforts to bring a resolution before the UN Security Council condemning Russian aggression, noting the withdrawal of Georgian troops from South Ossetia, and calling for an immediate ceasefire and the withdrawal of Russian troops from Georgian territory. We should move ahead with the resolution despite Russian veto threats, and submit Russia to the court of world public opinion.

• NATO's North Atlantic Council should convene in emergency session to demand a ceasefire and begin discussions on both the deployment of an international peacekeeping force to South Ossetia and the implications for NATO's future relationship with Russia, a Partnership for Peace nation. NATO's decision to withhold a Membership Action Plan for Georgia might have been viewed as a green light by Russia for its attacks on Georgia, and I urge the NATO allies to revisit the decision.

• The Secretary of State should begin high-level diplomacy, including visiting Europe, to establish a common Euro-Atlantic position aimed at ending the war and supporting the independence of Georgia. With the same aim, the U.S. should coordinate with our partners in Germany, France, and Britain, to seek an emergency meeting of the G-7 foreign ministers to discuss the current crisis. The visit of French President Sarkozy to Moscow this week is a welcome expression of transatlantic activism.

• Working with allied partners, the U.S. should immediately consult with the Ukrainian government and other concerned countries on steps to secure their continued independence. This is particularly important as a number of Russian Black Sea fleet vessels currently in Georgian territorial waters are stationed at Russia's base in the Ukrainian Crimea.

• The U.S. should work with Azerbaijan and Turkey, and other interested friends, to develop plans to strengthen the security of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline.

• The U.S. should send immediate economic and humanitarian assistance to help mitigate the impact the invasion has had on the people of Georgia.

You should also read Barack Obama's statement on Georgia. It is hard to find a plan of action in the speech.

• We should continue to push for a United Nations Security Council Resolution calling for an immediate end to the violence.

• There should also be a United Nations mediator to address this crisis, and the United States should fully support this effort.

• We should also convene other international forums to condemn this aggression, to call for an immediate halt to the violence, and to review multilateral and bilateral arrangements with Russia - including Russia's interest in joining the World Trade Organization. ... (Then he digresses on the irony of this happening during the Olympic celebration of peace and unity.)
  

• That means Russian peacekeeping troops should be replaced by a genuine international peacekeeping force, Georgia should refrain from using force in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and a political settlement must be reached that addresses the status of these disputed regions. (This is stated more as a daydream than an actionable item.)

• Beyond immediate humanitarian assistance, we must provide economic assistance, and help rebuild what has been destroyed. I have consistently called for deepening relations between Georgia and transatlantic institutions, including a Membership Action Plan for NATO, and we must continue to press for that deeper relationship.

Whereas McCain provided a thorough (for a short speech) historical context for understanding the invasion, Obama says only, "The relationship between Russia and the West is long and complicated. There have been many turning points, for good and ill. This is another turning point." He calls repeatedly on Russia to "end the violence," but there is no reference to Russia's regional ambitions and their threat to the wider world.

And there is this puzzling statement. "There is also an urgent need for humanitarian assistance to reach the people of Georgia, and casualties on both sides." How is it our responsibility to give humanitarian assistance for Russian casualties? Surely the oil-rich aggressor state can handle that.

He thinks that flattery or verbal assurance that we are no threat to Russian greatness will make a difference. "We want Russia to play its rightful role as a great nation..."

Obama is good with metaphors. In dealing with steely, wall-building imperialists like Putin, he seems ridiculously unqualified.

In her recent column, "Mr. Darcy Comes Courting," Maureen Dowd, after comparing her Barry Obambi to Jane Austen's Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice (but, as I have argued, inadvertently diminishing her candidate by the comparison), parenthetically casts John McCain as Wickham, "the rival for Elizabeth’s affections, the engaging military scamp who casts false aspersions on Darcy’s character."

You can find a better contrast of characters in Jennifer Rubin's "The Ultimate Contrast" in Commentary. First she quotes from David Ignatius's column on McCain in The Washington Post ("McCain's True Voice").

McCain's triumph, finally, was that he got over Vietnam. He didn't fulminate against antiwar activists. ("I have made far too many mistakes in my own life to forever disparage people.") He accepted the ways America had changed in his absence. He didn't bear grudges. He had finally grown up. McCain wrote in a magazine article soon after his homecoming in March 1973: "Now that I'm back, I find a lot of hand-wringing about this country. I don't buy that. I think America today is a better country than the one I left nearly six years ago."

She then adds:

Given the current back-and-forth on The Ego and the examination of Barack Obama’s enormous self-regard, the contrast between the two candidates is breathtaking. McCain himself has seemed from time to time to hint at the same theme as he looked back at his callow youth and exaggerated self-regard, which in retrospect he saw as entirely undeserved. McCain’s reminiscence sets up implicit contrast with his opponent, whom McCain suggests, suffers from this very arrogance....That huge dichotomy between an accomplished, humble man and an arrogant, unaccomplished one is, I think, what McCain’s team is driving at.

In this election, we have an old candidate and a young one, an experienced and tested one and an inexperienced and untested one, a candidate whose virtues and vices are well known to us and one who is shrouded in mystery. One is curmudgeony and the other slick. Both men are profoundly influenced by their respective pasts and have written books about their respective fathers. There is a literary quality to these unfolding events. An intelligent design, one might even say. But the details are set forth in way to confront the American people with a clear choice between sober, adult government and downy, pop star make-believe.

On this same theme, you can read Rich Lowry's "The Audacity of Haughty," and see John Trever's cartoon (Albuquerque Journal) of a personified America coming to Obama's filling station, but finding only three pumps labeled "air."

Who is this Barack Hussein Obama? The more we learn, the less we seem to know. The more he shows himself, the more shadows we discover in his character. And he is, practically speaking, the Democratic nominee for the office of President of the United States. I think that indicates the state of philosophical confusion and political incompetence in the Democratic Party.

The executive authority in the United States government is an awesome power. Granted, it is limited by law, fundamentally by the Constitution, and limited also to the federal sphere. Under that constitution, it is also balanced by two other branches of government, as well as by political realities. His greatest power is as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. The long vetting process for this office has been a happy development. It means that we are less likely to elect a charming but relatively unexplored golden boy in the flush of media excitement. We have time to sober up, ask the right questions, check under the candidate's hood and make sure that he is "safe at any speed."

In his column the other day, David Brooks exposed a few more Obama shadows. Though not a supporter, Brooks has been a sympathetic but analytical student of Obama from the start. In "Where's The Landslide?," he suggests that one reason that, according to the polls, the American electorate in general has not succumbed to Obamamania and has left the Enlightened One virtually tied with the 72 year old war horse John McCain is that "Obama is a sojourner...There is a sense that because of his unique background and temperament, Obama lives apart. He put one foot in the institutions he rose through on his journey but never fully engaged. As a result, voters have trouble placing him in his context, understanding the roots and values in which he is ineluctably embedded...[V]oters seem to be slow to trust a sojourner they cannot place."

Obama has spent his adult life undertaking serious responsibilities, putting himself in a position to serve people, but never following through to genuine accomplishment. He has always had only the appearance of public service. (I thank Bill Dupray at The Patriot Room for this breakdown of Brooks's points. He just saved me the time of doing it myself.)

Childhood

This has been a consistent pattern throughout his odyssey. His childhood was a peripatetic journey through Kansas, Indonesia, Hawaii and beyond. He absorbed things from those diverse places but was not fully of them.

College

His college years were spent on both coasts. He was a community organizer for three years but left before he could be truly effective. He became a state legislator, but he was in the Legislature, not of it. He had some accomplishments, but as Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker wrote, he was famously bored by the institution and used it as a stepping stone to higher things.

Law school professor

He was a popular and charismatic professor, but he rarely took part in faculty conversations or discussions about the future of the institution. He had a supple grasp of legal ideas, but he never committed those ideas to paper by publishing a piece of scholarship.

He was in the law school, but not of it.

Church

He was in Trinity United Church of Christ, but not of it, not sharing the liberation theology that energized Jeremiah Wright Jr.

Senate

He is in the United States Senate, but not of it. He has not had the time nor the inclination to throw himself into Senate mores, or really get to know more than a handful of his colleagues. His Democratic supporters there speak of him fondly, but vaguely.

This is very strange behavior. Even if I agreed with his policies (Do we even know what his policies are? They keep changing, depending on who he's addressing.), I would be wary of nominating someone (a) with so little experience in government, and (b) who made so little of what opportunities he has had.

All of this seems to point to Obama himself as the focus of Obama's life. Despite all the "we" of his rhetoric, his life points overwhelmingly to "me," more than we have seen in anyone else who has risen this high politically. One would think that taking the community organizer career route was a choice for service over privilege, but he worked only three years at that and left before he accomplished anything of substance. It was an entry on his political resume. He did the time and got the line. It was all about Obama, all about "me." From an early age he set his sights on the White House and followed whatever intermediate steps were necessary. But he skipped lightly through these steps, avoiding controversy and any real commitment to anyone but himself. Hence, no academic publications. Hence, all the "present" votes, though he did also establish a solidly liberal voting record in his one year of Senate service before he undertook campaigning for president so that radicalized Democratic primary voters would take him seriously.

We see this Obamacentric orientation in his wife, Michelle. Why is she finally proud of America? She told us that the only reason is that America is recognizing her husband's greatness and promise. Her lately discovered pride in America has nothing to do with America and everything to do with Obama.

Maureen Dowd, who loves her Barry Obambi, inadvertently and subtly drew attention to Obama's disturbing self-focus in "Mr. Darcy Comes Courting." She compares Obama to "the clever, haughty, reserved and fastidious Mr. Darcy," Jane Austin's character in her novel, Pride and Prejudice. But my wife tells me (I have not read any Jane Austen on account of a defect in my soul) that, unlike Barack Obama, Mr. Darcy often sacrifices his self-interest either for someone whom he loves or simply for the sake of duty or the common good. Honest students of this admirable Austen character will notice this glaring contrast. Maureen, take note.

Further exploration: Shelby Steele's book, A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win. On that subject, you may consult Steele's TIME magazine article, "The Identity Card," and George Will's disagreement with Steele's assessment, "Misreading Obama's Identity."