Is it already over for Obama?

For everyone who was stirred and moved by Barack Obama’s inspiring and intelligent speech this week — one of the finest of my lifetime  — I have bad news. He will not be the next president. He may not even be the Democratic nominee. I pray and hope that I’m wrong. But the evidence is not good.

Why? Maybe it will be because, as Matt Bai pointed out in the New York Times Magazine, Obama only wins urban areas with concentrated black voters and states with few blacks — not enough for an electoral majority. He loses in the critical places with real (segregated) diversity, such as Ohio:

What this suggests, perhaps, is that living in close proximity to other
races — sharing industries and schools and sports arenas — actually
makes Americans less sanguine about racial harmony rather than more so.
The growing counties an hour’s drive from Cleveland and St. Louis are
filled with white voters whose parents fled the industrial cities of
their youth before a wave of African-Americans and for whom social
friction and economic competition, especially in an age of declining
opportunity, are as much a part of daily life as traffic and mortgage
payments.

Maybe it will be because Hillary Clinton has shown she will destroy the party rather than lose the nomination. Maybe it will be because Obama is such a threat to the community of interests that wants things to stay as they are (no need for conspiracy theories).

Maybe it will be a combination of all these things, and more that we will only understand in time. The double-standard applied to Obama’s preacher, while ignoring the horrid positions of McCain’s ministers, would almost make one think the community of interests decided Obama had to be taken out now. And given the horror of white Americans in hearing snippets of the Rev. Wright, and their tolerance of the regular statements of the likes of the Revs. Parsley and Hagee, one sees the right weapon was applied. An uppity black man had to be brought down.

Why? Maybe it was thoughts such as this one from Obama’s speech:

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white
resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle
class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing,
questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington
dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that
favor the few over the many.

The potential losers in an Obama era are the most powerful forces in America.

And maybe it was because Obama is too unpredictable. While he could be just as boringly programmatic as Hillary, he also had some Rooseveltian ambiguity to him. When FDR campaigned in 1932, he spoke for not much more than mom, apple pie and a balanced budget. A good thing, too. The calamity of the time called for an experimenter rather than an ideologue. It also called for a politician who was more wily than perhaps the idealistic Obama is capable of being. But President Obama might have actually done something about the great challenges facing America.

I wonder what will happen to his supporters. The soul-killing irony is that they may, in their disillusionment, jump into the trenches of an America already more divided than at any time since the Civil War. Or they will simply give up and try to live out quiet lives as the nation continues its decadent decline, wondering what might have been.