Political Virtuoso

It's over. Turn out the lights. Shut down the McCain web sites, send the Clintons home. Senator Barack Obama will be the next President of the United States.

I just watched his interview on FOX News Sunday and I do not think I have ever seen a better political performance.

Chris Wallace was never hostile or pushy, but every question was difficult. He didn't even throw up a couple of softballs in the beginning. He kept his promise to ask some questions that have not been asked. But Senator Obama parried every question flawlessly. He was engaging and likeable and reasonable. He made Bill Clinton look like Nixon.

He opened the interview with some likable persiflage about the "Obama Watch Clock," suggesting there had been a leap year and perhaps it was only 771 days since he said he would come on the show.

Wallace then asked about exit polls and demographics. Obama assured him that Democrats would pull together in November, and that he doesn't apologize for any electoral successes of the "popular Clinton brand."

About race, he said that while we're not beyond racism in society, we are ready to elect an African American President: "If I lose, it won’t be because of race. It will be because, you know, I made mistakes on the campaign trail, I wasn’t communicating effectively my plans in terms of helping them in their everyday lives."

On Reverend Wright he found a perfect line and held it throughout. He never threw Wright under the bus, but he effectively aligned himself with him as a pastor, all the while taking a strong stance against his politics. He summed up with generational differences, and said "The problem — and I pointed this out in my speech in Philadelphia — was where oftentimes he would err, I think, is in only cataloguing the bad of America and not doing enough to lift up the good. And that’s probably where he and I have the biggest difference..."

Then Obama brings up the flag pin kerfuffle -- on FOX News -- and hits it out of the park:

I don’t think - let me just use another example. On flag pins, I have worn flag pins in the past. I will wear flag pins in the future. The fact that I said that some politicians use the flag pin and then aren’t acting in a particularly patriotic way, for that to someone be translated into me being anti-patriotic or anti-flag, I think that is a distraction.

I think that that is not reflective of me or the love that I have for this country. Keep in mind, I think (INAUDIBLE) the scene nationally at the Democratic convention, giving what I would say was about as patriotic a speech about what America means to me and what this country’s about as any speech that we’ve heard in a long time.

He took every question and accepted every question as fair. He may not have answered every question, but I have not seen a Sunday show where a pol did for a long time. The panel was a lot less impressed than I was. Brit Hume thought he had dodged the issue of Clinton's vote lead on White 29-50 year olds with blue Toyotas who like hot dogs, but I don't see the electorate drawn to inside baseball. Bill Kristol pointed out that it wasn't wonkish, that "36 minutes of Senator Clinton" would have yielded specific proposals and legislation, but I think the interview was more ethereal. Wallace pressed for a little specifics on taxes, but Obama matched Wallace for style.

Wallace asked him how he calls himself post-partisan when he votes with the Democrats. Obama suggested that Republicans sometimes do have better ideas. When pressed on what, he suggested that top-down regulation has been more onerous and less effective than systems that involve business and market forces, such as cap-and-trade on pollution. Brilliant! The Democrats hear "we can continue regulating if we do it right" and the Republicans here "this guy knows the harsh effects of over-regulation."

How does he support General Plateaus but not his Surge? He would direct Petraeus to come up with a plan that would demand Iraqi responsibility but did not blindly support the Iraqi government. This guy is good.

My only negative -- besides the fact that he's wrong about absolutely everything -- is that he is no smoother at extemporaneous speech than our current President. Harsh words for a Democrat, I know, but he stammers and pauses and says the wrong word then corrects it, all the stuff that has filled the "Bushism" books. Yet people remember his soaring, scripted rhetoric and forget his flubs. (I swear he mangled two words once and said "Shit" but that did not make the transcript, he quickly corrected to the phrase he meant.)

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey disagrees.

April 24, 2008