The real problem Obama faces - besides uniting the party - is recovering the sweetness of his message. The pastor-boating dirtied him up pretty effectively, no matter how irrelevant and smear-filled most of it was.
O.k., he is a politician after all. He has to fight in the gutter; that's just the way it is. But he needs to regain his ability to get voters to look at the stars.
Growing up in East Tennessee, I often heard my father complain about mugwump Democrats who would vote for the stupidest, most venal, most hide-bound and conservative candidate in the primary. These mugwumps would then vote for the Republican in the general, though they'd maintain that they were still part of the Democrat (sic) Party.
"I vote for the man," they'd say, "not the party." Sure, that way they could be sure of getting the dumbest bag of hammers to represent them. Probably accurately, at that.
Now, we have mugwumps on a national scale, though they've finally admitted that they really do belong in the Republican Party. They're still trying to screw the real Democrats, of course.
For those with their heads in the sand, here's a demonstration of the power of Rush Limbaugh. (Tell me, if Eliot Spitzer is going to be prosecuted, why Rush is still unindicted?)
Hillary did have a good rejoinder:
"Be careful what you wish for, Rush," she said with a grin.
So, if John Edwards were really insincere about poverty and corporate power, is this what it would look like? For a Republican to get this treatment, he has to do visible 180s about anything inconvenient (Romney); for a Democrat, it's standard treatment. And it's not as if either of these signature issues is actually convenient, at least not to the conventional narrative of the media.
