The sad thing is that he has a huge patriotism problem now, after chastizing other dems for allowing the President the benefit of the doubt.

A guy that has to refer to his distant relatives to get some reflected military Glory is in trouble against a guy who sacrificed his own body in the service of his national and rarely mentions it himself.

In fact, it's more than probable that there are some Undecided SDs as well as Publicly Declared SDs who are increasingly uneasy about not only Obama but with what the DNC is so blatantly doing that they may courageously "buck the trend" and go with the one who has a stronger Electoral Chance deciding to side with the Voters and not the 2000 Redux Gang.

We always assume that these as of yet in-the-dark SDs are driven by something other than an electoral victory in November.  But what if the majority of them DO want to win in the General and are now chafing -- quietly, but definitely chafing -- under the yoke of Dean and Brazil and a horribly embarrassing gaffe prone Chosen One whose past his peak and trending downward?  

What if they came out for Barack during the halycon days of February, but now deeply regret that and are intending to switch once the contests are over?  Or once they can figure out how to do so without suffering a broken leg or a horse's head in their bed.

In fact, what if they'd rather cozy up to and support a sure-bet (well, more sure than Obama at this point) President Clinton?  

Given the choice, I'd choose the President Hillary Clinton over the on-his-way-out-the-door and powerless Howard Dean and infamously thuggish Donna Brazil any day.

That's what I think is happening under-the-radar and out-of-sight of our famously blind, deaf and dumb "media".  Let the Voters finish, she'll have a popular vote lead and, therefore, give them cover to make their choice.

"After some throat-clearing, Obama gets into the meat of the speech by offering himself as a role model for the graduating seniors:

    But during my first two years of college, perhaps because the values my mother had taught me --hard work, honesty, empathy -- had resurfaced after a long hibernation. . . .  

    I wrote letters to every organization in the country I could think of. And one day, a small group of churches on the South Side of Chicago offered me a job to come work as a community organizer in neighborhoods that had been devastated by steel plant closings. My mother and grandparents wanted me to go to law school. My friends were applying to jobs on Wall Street. Meanwhile, this organization offered me $12,000 a year plus $2,000 for an old, beat-up car.

    And I said yes.    

The single sentence paragraph at the end of this section has got to be my favorite part of the speech, though Obama modestly allowing that his evident virtues of hard work, honesty, and empathy are due to his mother is a close second.

What's funny about his sacrifice is that when Obama took this job, $14,000 was about the average salary for somebody getting out of college. Of course, Obama wasn't just a run-of-the-mill college graduate; he was an Ivy-Leaguer, who graduated from Columbia with a BA in political science.  A corporate career would almost certainly have been more lucrative -- for a while.  Last year, his family income was about $4,200,000. I don't have the data, but I bet that compares reasonably favorably with the average household income of 1983 Columbia political science and 1991 Harvard Law School graduates. Nonetheless, Obama did sacrifice some of his expected credential-based wage premium for a number of years.

Obama Staffer's Lobbying Work Runs Counter to Candidate's Guidelines, Ethics Watchdogs Say

By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 28, 2008; 6:55 PM

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/28/AR2008052802499.html?hpid=topnews

Are we in the twilight zone?

Did he not know any of this jazz was wrong while it was happening? While he was enabling it?