Obama to McCain and Country: Enough Already

One can almost hear John Kerry's innermost thoughts in regretful overdrive this morning: "Gee, why didn't I think of that?"

The that would be the shish-kebabing and outdoor barbecuing and general flaming by which Barack Obama marinated and then cooked his Republican opponent's rather tough hide last night.

Well done, I'd say, in both senses of the words.

It was, as Dan Balz of the Washington Post reviewed it with exquisite economy this morning, precisely "what many nervous Democrats were hoping for."

It was the cannon fire of the '1812 Overture,' church bells and fully charged batteries included. It was the emotional mobilization of John Philip Sousa with partisan attitude. It was Obama's favorite dramatist, Mario Puzo, with more than a satisfying touch of Shakespearean revenge.

It was the fiery FDR, the spunky HST, the passionate and thoughtful JFK. Yes, it was precisely what many nervous Democrats were hoping for -- and every Republican feared, and this morning loathes.

It was, in the most defining word deployed by Obama last night, a simple, direct and official notification: Enough.

With a rhetorical elegance that virtually all of Obama's opponents have dispiritedly conceded as his alone, the Democratic nominee incisively stitched the past to the immediate future: Enough already, not only of what you've done and helped do for the past eight years, Mr. McCain, but enough of what you're thinking of doing for the next two months.

We all know what that is, and last night Obama's calling out of McCain in the most public way he could must surely have left the latter paled and palsied beyond consolation in one of his many plush homes. Because once deprived of effective character assassination, what weapon is the Republican candidate to use? His record?

"Ninety percent": from now till November 4 a catchall comeback to nearly every McCain claim of accomplishment. Not a 90 percent record of anything even resembling what anyone might call success, but an indisputable 90 percent opposition to fiscal sanity and global good citizenship and everyday common sense and even plain human decency.

So what, as though we don't already know, does McCain's dark abyss of eight years depth leave him to work with? What is it he's already employed? What is it his slithering, incurably depraved Rovebots are plotting and scheming to work overtime in the next two months?

Naturally.

Against which, Obama again threw down the public gauntlet of Enough.

And so did -- and do -- independent and Democratic servicemen and women who have fought and suffered and died and continue to fight and suffer and die for their country, just like -- guess what? -- Republican servicemen and women.They have not served a red America or a blue America -- they have served the United States of America. So I've got news for you, John McCain: We all put our 'Country First.'

Now that Obama has served fair notice on McCain that the same old Republican crap of scurrilous imputation won't cut it this time, does that suggest they'll both now roam onto the political playing fields of Eton, hail fellows both well met?

Of course not. It's going to get nastily bloody again, because through necessity foul play is all the GOP has in its one-page playbook. But, this time the Democrat grabbed not so much the Republican candidate but the public by the lapels, shook it and bellowed: Don't be fooled again. Enough already.

Yesterday I bemoaned and criticized Barack Obama's somewhat lethargic summertime approach. Last night he erased that lament.