Obama's Fortuitous Enemies

"By almost every measure," Dan Balz of the Washington Post wrote, "Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's overseas tour that concluded here [in London] Saturday was a clear success.... What isn't measurable is whether it worked. Will a week ... overcome the doubts he faces at home about his readiness to be president? And if it doesn't, what will?"

But just as Mr. Balz was asking, Gallup was answering -- at least in the limited way that any polling organization is able to answer. Sunday it released a fresh tracking poll that showed a nine-point advantage for Obama, just one painful point away from that magical double-digit status which provides so much aid and comfort to the soothsaying commentariat.

"The margin, coincident with the extensive U.S. news coverage of Obama's foreign tour," said Gallup, "is the largest for Obama over McCain measured since Gallup began tracking the general election horserace in March."

But then, Balzian- and koan-like, there came from Gallup the sound of that other, more ghostly shoe dropping: "A key question remains as to whether this 'bounce' is short-term (as happens to bounces in some instances following intense publicity surrounding a convention) or if his lead will persist."

Yes, that is commonly the question when a lead in any endeavor exists. Will it prosper and multiply? Will it flatline? Will it drop like the consumer confidence index? These, gentle reader, just in case you haven't made a scientific study of it, as polling organizations have, are the three general directions in which any statistical lead can head. Now you know.

Of greater entertainment value, however, is in the observance of the given pol out in the electoral wild -- Homo Politicus, as Balz's colleague, Dana Milbank, calls the creature -- as he plays with the numbers like a cat pawing a toy. And for my money, no pol is better at the expectations game than Barack Obama.  

"I'm not sure there's any short-term [political gain]," he told the traveling press corps en route from Paris to London, "and I know that seems strange since obviously we put a lot of work into it. I don't think that we'll see a bump in the polls. I think we might even lose some points" -- which Obama, in the role of Cheshire cat, believed about as firmly as John McCain believes he'll carry Massachusetts. 

At any rate, Obama then connected his gloomy, personal forecast with the declining personal fortunes of those marooned in George Bush's savage economy: "People back home are worried about gas prices; they're worried about jobs."

True enough. And among those folks knowledgeable enough to be genuinely worried about gas prices, jobs and the economy in general there must surely thrive an increasing worry that Obama's opponent is, it seems, a bit cracked.

After all, more corporate tax cuts and a little ExxonMobil offshore drilling to cure all that ails us?

Furthermore, what precisely is it that ails us? What, in McCain's stated opinion, is the greatest threat to the U.S. economy? "I would think that the absolute gravest threat is the struggle that we're in against radical Islamic extremism, which can affect, if they prevail, our very existence."

That's what the man said. About the economy. One-track Johnnie, who has embarked on a general election campaign possessed of the vastly improbable notion that voters will associate a costly Hundred Years War against scraggly terrorists with their best odds of finding a job.

All of which leads to this greater observation: From the start, Obama has been blessed with the most peculiar opponents. He could not have done what he's done, accomplished what he's accomplished, made it as far as he has made it, without them. From Hillary Clinton's martial fixations to John Edwards' rather mutable fixations to McCain's ... whatever, they have always been there, ready with their own message implosions that propel Obama even farther.

For a black man, he truly has the luck of the Irish. Obama himself could not have scripted a more promising GOP campaign -- for Democrats. Just as Tarmac Hillary almost literally shot herself in the foot, McCain persists in doing so almost each and every day, with gaffe after gaffe and inscrutable policy solution after inscrutable policy solution. His is among the most dependable of self-demolitions I've ever observed in politics.

So as for Obama's bouncing poll numbers? Not to worry. In the long run, McCain has him covered.