Winning should be a slam dunk for Obama - Barack is changing the game

Barack Obama knows what he’s doing. He’s changing the way campaigns are run. Or, as he puts it in his new book, “I’m LeBron, baby. I can play on this level. I got some game.” From one black man to another, all I can say is, “word.” Because after him, the game will never be the same.

The second quarter fundraising numbers are in – and they spell bad news for anyone not named Obama. He raised an unprecedented $32.5 million, with $31 million to be used in the primary campaign and with $10 million coming from online contributions. That’s more cash for just the primary than Hillary Clinton raised in total for the quarter ($27 million) and more than John Edwards has raised all year ($23 million). More importantly, he’s gotten over 258,000 people to contribute to his campaign, more than the top three Republican candidates combined and more than the infamous Clinton donor list (which took 25 years to compile) - and he did it in only six months.

There is no viable Republican candidate. Voters are practically screaming for something different in Washington, D.C. and the only Republican candidate who can “unite the right”, Fred Thompson, may be a lot of things, but an agent for change isn’t one of them. The “second tier” of Democratic candidates will be all but gone by the time the results of the Iowa Caucuses are in on January 14th, and will certainly have faded away after the New Hampshire Primary on the 22nd (except Dennis Kucinich, he’s in for the duration). That will leave Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards – who all have enough money to get to “Super Tuesday” on February 5th. But because no candidate who didn’t finish first or second in Iowa and New Hampshire has ever won the presidency, that will leave one of them (Edwards) desperate for a first place finish in Florida or South Carolina on January 22nd. Unfortunately for John Edwards, he lost his bid for the nomination in 2004, lost as John Kerry’s running mate, and will have lost in either Iowa, New Hampshire, or both by then - so he will reek of defeat. Desperation plus the stench of losing will not inspire voters. On top of that, Barack Obama is polling two-to-three times higher than John Edwards in South Carolina, Edwards’ home state. By February, the contest will be Obama vs. Clinton for the nomination.

When you listen to Republicans talk about the Democratic field, you always hear the same thing: Hillary is head-and-shoulders above the rest. Senator Obama’s detractors say that he’s an empty suit. They say he’s inexperienced. They say he speaks in generalities and has yet to explain what he stands for and where he wants to take the country. Basically, they say he lacks substance. I say they’re wrong. I say he’s changing the game. He knows there is no need to offer anything substantive while the field is still as big as a softball team. He’s got more than enough money and support to carry him through February, and by the time March rolls around, he will have enough delegates to be competitive with Hillary Clinton. And the only reason why Republicans are so high on Hillary is because they want to run against her (and her husband) and they are scared to death of the “Barack Now” movement.

By next spring, Hillary will have dug her own grave. She will have spent the better part of a year re-positioning herself as an anti-war candidate and trying to distance herself from her own vote authorizing the use of force in Iraq in the first place. And it will not work. Why? Because Barack Obama was the President of the Harvard Law Review, so he knows how to debate and he certainly knows how to frame an argument. Senator Clinton voted to give President Bush the authority to go to war, but without reading the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. She voted against an amendment which would have required the President to come back to Congress for authorization to use force in Iraq if the UN Security Council didn’t grant it, and from the Senate floor said Saddam had “given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members,” parroting the President’s justification despite any evidence to support it. So it will be child’s play for Senator Obama to expose her as a fraud.

With any Republican candidate marginalized, having bested the rest of the field, and having shown Senator Clinton as an opportunistic hypocrite, Barack Obama will be the last one standing at the Democratic National Convention in Denver next August. And I, personally, cannot wait to hear how he’s going to top the speech he gave in Boston in 2004.