Redstate

Interestingly, linking the original quote to "hubris" may just be an artifact of our modern culture.

By Moe Lane Posted in 2008 | Barack Obama | Hubris | The Best Democratic Primary EVER — Comments (29) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Come, I will hide nothing from you: I am a geek.

Yes, many of you are shocked, given that I hide it so well - but no, I have the obligatory shelves of science fiction and fantasy novels, steampunk comic books, and roleplaying game supplements. I construct alternate history maps for fun. I dress up in medieval clothing on weekends and go watch people in armor hit each other with wooden sticks. My other major online hobby is writing amateur gaming material for a system that involves angels vs. demons, usually with gratuitous automatic weapons fire involved*. In short, I am what this man good-naturedly lampooned (and self-lampooned).

I'm mentioning all of this because otherwise you might not get why I found this particular Washington Times piece so funny:

I perceived a more serious problem mounting for the candidate. There was a fundamental weirdness in these episodes that reminded me of a condition President Jimmy Carter found himself in not long into his presidency. He was suffering some sort of diabolical infestation. Supernatural pranksters had made their way from heaven or hell to trip him up. What was happening to Jimmy when he claimed to be attacked by a huge amphibious bunny rabbit or during numerous jogging mishaps was not normal. Now the paranormal has settled upon the Obama campaign.

[snip of several paragraphs' worth of Obama oopsies]

Now people who know Mr. Obama have been telling me for months that he is a very likable fellow and very clever. The problem he has, they say, is that things come easily to him. So easily that often times he simply wings it, expecting his facile mind to get him through. That makes sense. The tendency to wing it is encouraged all the more by Mr. Obama's insufferable arrogance.

Yet I fear his problems are more complicated. He is in the mess Mr. Carter has been in ever since the 39th president's ill-starred administration. Mr. Obama's campaign is haunted by supernatural mischief-makers. The fates are against him. Ghosts and goblins want to have fun at his expense.

They're not the only ones, of course.

Read on.

John Fund of the Wall Street Journal writes in the same vein, albeit with less allegations of overt supernatural intervention:

For months, Barack Obama has had the image of an incandescent, golden-tongued Wundercandidate. That image may be fraying now.

As smart and credentialed as he is, Sen. Obama is often an indifferent speaker without a teleprompter. He has large gaps in his knowledge base, and is just as likely to dig in and embrace a policy misstatement as abandon it. ABC reporter Jake Tapper calls him "a one-man gaffe machine."

[snip of what Fund calls "the Auschwitz flub"]

That hardly disqualifies Mr. Obama from being president. But you can bet that if Hillary Clinton had done the same thing it would have been the focus of much more attention, especially after her Bosnia sniper-fire fib. That's because gaffes are often blown up or downplayed based on whether or not they further a story line the media has attached to a politician.

While funny (and the RNC is keeping track of Obama's other mistakes this week, by the way), all of this is also relevant because it reveals a somewhat significant (and potentially disastrous) problem faced by the Obama campaign: excessive cockiness. Note that I didn't limit that to Senator Obama himself. His staff is just as susceptible to the condition.

To be fair, they've had a good run so far. Their manipulation of the Democratic primary was impressive, from a power-gamer's perspective: the combination of Red State caucus manipulation, clever encouragement of progressive liberal white guilt, and full-court co-opting of the African-American voting bloc has put them in a position where they are the current front-runner, even though the only first-rank Blue State that Obama has actually won so far has been his home state of Illinois. Or, as this rather crude map demonstrates:

Blue for Clinton, Red for Obama, Black for Red States in 2004

...while he's ahead in the count, it's because his strategy emphasized, say, North Dakota over Massachusetts, or Nebraska over California, or any other combination that you like.

Again, a very clever primary strategy - if he tries it in the general he'll get hammered across the board, of course, but that's another issue. Unfortunately, it may have been too clever a strategy, because it's encouraging his supporters (and, increasingly, the candidate himself) to think that he's invincible. The reality - actual, objective reality - right now is that the Obama campaign is in a little bit of trouble. They are currently behind in the head-to-head polls, there is a large stretch of the traditionally Democratic Rust Belt that is increasingly looking like specifically anti-Obama territory, and his primary opponent is well aware of both of those facts.

Worse for him, he cannot hope to have his primary opponent quit; he has to make her quit, somehow. Or the Democratic Party does. Obama would very much like to declare victory next week, once the remaining two Mountain West states are in - but even if he does, he still needs to have Clinton admit to it. If she doesn't, and goes after the super-delegates full-throttle, Obama will have to spend the rest of the summer fighting her off before the convention. It'll take place mostly under the radar, but as long as Clinton's still swinging, the contest is still in doubt - so it's in his best interests to get her to stop swinging, which implies a certain delicate touch from him, his campaign, and his supporters.

(pause)

Do I really need to provide links to the general tone that Obama supporters are directing towards Clinton supporters (and vice versa) right now? - because a random sampling of HuffPo, dKos, Taylor Marsh, TalkLeft, Politico and any major newspaper's pet blogs could provide enough anger, resentment, and hate to fuel a Sith Lord. And it's mostly the Obama supporters' fault: or, rather, the failure for it to stop is the Obama supporters' responsibility. The general impression that one gets is that the progressives that are pretty much representing the public face of Obama's campaign these days are so ecstatic that they finally have the upper hand over somebody that they've collectively forgotten that they'll actually need later the people that they're attacking now. Or that, just because Obama supporters have nowhere else to go, that doesn't actually mean that neither do Clinton supporters.

Which leads us back to hubris - at least, our modern definition of it, which isn't the same as the one the ancient Greeks used. The next few weeks will be very interesting: either Clinton will drop out, which will probably add even more fuel to the fire which is the Obama campaign's self-regard; or she won't, which will almost certainly mean that the intra-Party war gets nastier (and, yes, it can get infinitely nastier). Either way, there's going to be a lot of hubris and arrogance on display out there - and not least from the Obama campaign itself, which has carefully crafted a persona for its candidate that is short one small step from being actually angelic. Which means that they never read Tim Powers**:

Sin by sensuality, and you sin as a beast;
sin by dishonesty, and you sin as a man;
sin by pride, and you sin as the angels.

And Pride, as they say, goeth before a Fall.

Moe Lane

PS: Have you signed up for the RedState Action Email yet? No, this has very little to do with the subject of this post, but I figure that anybody who bothered to read this far is probably fertile ground for my hypnotic powers.

*Please note, by the way, my utter lack of caring about whether people think less of me for any of that. If that sort of thing worried me, I'd blog under a pseudonym.

**Very good book, by the way.