I’ve been wrong before, and this is just late summer speculation, so all I can do is trust that the campaign has already diagnosed the problem and planned a response. One thing however that Andrea Mitchell said the other night echoes what I’ve heard before and stuck in my mind: Barack can be exceptionally stubborn and hard to move, so I hope they’re extra-persuasive in bringing him around.

First, Reagan was a well-known and admired white actor, and the primary issue was temperament/competence, so his challenges were different and simpler. He was already a guest-member of the club so to speak, and only had to establish his credentials, ot his acceptability. This doesn’t bear any comparison.

Furthermore, in every cycle, we convince ourselves that the voters have had it with good old boys who turn out to be policy nightmares, and in every cycle, the electoral vote disproves that, so it’s like ‘wait till next year’ was for the Brooklyn Dodger fans. It seems to me that what happens is that many voters decide first if they like and trust a candidate, and when they do, they reverse engineer their thinking so that his policies don’t seem so bad. That’s why we see such a divergence between pure policy-based polls and the presidential preference polls. And of course its magnified by race, which isn’t going to go away - we can only hope to limit it’s impact, and that gets back to convincing a lot of people he’s just a darker skinned version of their next door neighbor. It’s the convergence of racism and perceived elitism that’s dangerous. McCain will never overtly play the race card, but the elitist argument is a surrogate for people that accentuates his alienness.

So, Obama may be his own worst enemy. He has begun to believe some of the things that his most fanatical supporters have claimed for him. By any rational standard, McCain is a dismal choice, but Obama has to get down off Olympus and convince a lot of people that he’s the real thing. His recent press coverage doesn’t help in that regard, and the debates won’t do it either because of a possible sympathy for an over-matched McCain - style points don’t get full credit.

He needs to get out with people, stop the airy discussion about hope and change and talk turkey. Like a lot of others, I’m pulling in harness to go after McCain full bore, and there’s a time for that, but it isn’t before Obama has come back to earth and established his street creds - it’s afterwards.

On the stadium question, I’m not sure that it’s really a negative. Party conventions are not full of ordinary Americans but die-hard partisans, and it would be hypocritical for McCain to use the stadium in a negative ad to portray Obama as elitist as McCain is also going to give a speech to his own die-hard partisans, only it will (likely) be worse than Obama’s. I think it will be more of a neutral effect. McCain could use the Football stadium as a way of showing Obama as more of a celebrity than as a President, but Obama’s speech will increase Democratic enthusiam to the stratosphere, despite some Clinton supporters deciding to not support Obama on the premise that Clinton will not be on the ticket. So in a sense, neither candiate will get a big boost from the conventions, which probably favors McCain. If Obama wants to win the election comfortably, then that chance won’t come until the debates. Just as Taniel has said, Reagan was considered a dangerous cowboy but he assured voters in his debates that he could be trusted and he beat Carter easily in the end. Obama can do the same. Only reason why it is less likely is that McCain is not an incumbent president running for reelection.