Defend yourself, defend us

So much electronic ink has been expended on the latest reverse in this zigzagging primary season that I hesitate to add any. But we needed this week for its significance to settle out of the agitated waters stirred up by the Ohio and Texas primaries.

My reading of them is that Obama got a test of his presidential timber—and failed it. He can bounce back, but it won’t do to pretend he can rise above partisanship and avoiding delivering a knuckle sandwich when that’s what’s called for. His speeches appealing to our better selves are just fine, but when he stood there taking the blows from the Hillary camp and failing to send them back, he looked weak.

That, as every Democratic candidate since Jimmy Carter can attest, is fatal.

For example, the first glimpse of the new tack from Clinton was her public dressing down of him for some campaign literature that allegely misrepresented a position of hers. No one today can remember what those positions were because that wasn’t the point. Obama responded smoothly and elegantly that it was old news, and he looked puzzled and almost amused by her outburst.

But we needed him to bore in on that opening and knock her off her soapbox. We needed him to say, Get a life, Hillary, and stop yer whining. This is a political fight, and if you’re not man enough for it, you’re in the wrong business.

Instead, that’s the message she gave about him. The Ohio women suddenly were full of admiration for Clinton as a ‘strong woman’. No one in the Obama camp was crowing with satisfaction about Barack being a ‘strong man.’

That’s why the 3:00 a.m. red phone call, despicable as it was, resonated. If he couldn’t bitch-slap someone as unpopular as Hillary when she handed him a giant opportunity, how was he going to take on the country’s adversaries and enemies? Nice-guy rhetoric suddenly looked naïve—which was exactly the target Clinton was aiming at.

Clinton also gave Obama another opening that he failed to exploit: she started a process that could lead to a split in the Democratic Party. If there’s one thing Democratic voters are united about, it’s the need to go into the November election with a hurricane-force wind at their backs and blow the Bush gang into the ozone layer. Obama could have sat somberly at a desk and correctly accused her of undermining that unity to feed her personal ambitions, and he would have nailed down an incontrovertible moral advantage.

Instead, he went on the defensive and answered the criticisms one by one. Now if he blasts her back en route to Pennsylvania, it may look like he’s responsible for the deepening division between the two camps.

This electoral cycle has shown repeatedly that candidates can recover from setbacks and rearrange the chessboard. Obama can too, but he’s got to stop looking like John Kerry without losing his anti-politics appeal. Reagan did it, and so did the ridiculous George W Bush. It can’t be that hard.