In case you are worried that the Republicans will eat up an untested Obama on charges that he is an unpatriotic black Muslim leftist teenager, let us remember:
Hillary Clinton was the inevitable front-runner, almost an incumbent, twenty to thirty points ahead in the national polls fourth months ago, and failed against a rookie with no name recognition, partly because of her negative campaign. Before the Iowa caucus, Obama slipped ahead in the polls for the first time following Shaheen's insinuations about Obama's use (and sale) of drugs. All three campaign chief strategists (Trippi, Penn, Axelrod) went on air on MSNBC to discuss this. In the heated exchange, each of them reflected their candidates. Trippi showed backbone, readiness for a fight, and quickness to point out injustices when he defended Obama and attacked Mark Penn; Axelrod stayed calm and above the fray; and Mark Penn looked simply awful, like a petty, slimy lawyer full of doublespeak and ill intentions. To me, it was the beginning of the end.
Negative attacks are not going to work this year. Obama is not exactly untested. The Clinton campaign brought up his drug use, his years in a school in Indonesia, the robo-calls asking the possibility that he might be a Muslim, and the picture with the turban in Somalia; tried to frame him as a Jesse Jackson candidate before and after South Carolina; spent an entire week with the plagiarism silliness; sent negative ads saying that Obama had praised Ronald Reagan's ideas, and negative mailers saying that Obama was no good on choice (despite his 100 rating); on top of the whole "where's the beef", "not ready", "false hopes" thing, they said that voting for him was like rolling the dice and played politics with terrorism reminding that Gordon Brown was quickly tested by terrorists when came into office; they also said that he was too leftist, and linked him to Hyde Park radicals and the Weather Underground because he said "hi" to Ayer and he donated 200 dollars for his state senate campaign; the "present" votes, the slumlord from Chicago... I may be forgetting a few.
The result has been the most successful and improbable campaign in the history of modern American politics. Maybe it didn't work in the primaries because Democrats don't fall for that so easily. But let's remember that where Obama hit it off the ballpark was with Independents and Republicans. Mitt Romney spent the most money on negative ads against his rivals and had to exit early. The New York Times' article against McCain has only strengthened his candidacy. I'm not saying that the era of negative ads is over. I know they successfully ran an ad against a war hero by juxtaposing his picture with that of Osama bin Laden, that the "call me" white girl sank Harold Ford's hopes, that "McCain's got a black kid" worked, that Kerry got swift-boated, and that Dukakis had a double-digits lead before Willie Horton. What I'm saying is that every single negative attack this year has fallen flat, and backfired. Negative ads many times do.
I'm European, and thus pessimistic. However, Katrina brought a perfect storm, a turn of the tide. And I promised to shake off my European pessimism when I saw Obama close a 10 points gap in Missouri when the last fifth of the votes were counted. You're doing an amazing job. No need to overreact if Jon Stewart makes a bad joke about Obama's name in the Oscars. My apologies if this diary is too long (this is my first), but I've made it my green-card holder duty to convince as many as I can, and I wanted to keep up the much-needed spirits of our better activists.