I have to confess that I've had similar thoughts to yours - that Obama has put the party in a nearly indefensible position vis-a-vis beating Republicans in swing areas.  The White House was practically OURS until Obama stepped in.  This mess is of his campaign's making.  What's always bothered me about Obama is his hubris in thinking he just HAS to be president.  He believed his own hype to the extent that he didn't believe (until now, one presumes) that he would have to put up with Rethug tactics just like any other Democrat.  If he didn't know this was coming, then he's a fool and so is Axelrod.  Rightly or wrongly, no one gets a pass in presidential politics for "God damn America."

Hillary, for all her flaws, is a consistent, steady, known quantity.  I don't love all her votes but I know that she is progressive, extremely intelligent, and a very hard worker.  And yes, she IS vetted.  Not that the Rethugs won't try, but I've said over and over that the country is pretty ho-hum anymore about the Clintons.  They don't care anymore.  Been there, done that.  This Wright stuff?  New and fascinating.  

He who is without sin, should cast the first stone.
It would be extremely difficult to find anyone without anything that he can be attacked upon.
Compare the two vulnarabilties of BHO to the wagonloads of skeletons still in HRC's closet.

I promise you that the first time you find someone without a single vulnarability it will prove to be someone who is to lazy to get of his ass.

Look who is saying things now?

"In his many months of stumping, Mr. Obama has rarely bid farewell to an audience the way he did at a morning event in Monaca, Pa. "God bless you and God bless America!" he proclaimed".

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Can we all now start painting David Axlerod with the same brush as Mark Penn?
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Only when Obama starts talking up McCain.

Axelrod is a scum sucking bottom feeder, he always has been and this race is no different.  It seems he can say anything about Clinton but no one can criticize his golden boy.  Well, this thing is now out of his hands, and it won't be pretty.  The Obama folks will be fighting a rear guard action from now on and if the SDs put Obama over the top, the dems will lose badly this fall.  Our only hope is for these idiots to realize it and swallow their pride and go for Clinton and put Obama as VP.

I absolutely agree with you.  The Clinton campaign has been very careful all along to point out that we will have a united party no matter who the nominee is come November.  She has never threatened to take her voters and walk away; she has never threatened civil war.  

Ed Rendell - a pretty important Clinton surrogate and supporter - was on Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me! this week, which was broadcasting from Pittsburgh.  He pointed out that either Obama or Clinton is going to lose, and said that their supporters will have about 10 days to pout and moan before the party unites again, to support the nominee.  

So why is Axelrod making such an inflammatory and divisive accusation?

 I am not a Clinton supporter. Why someone would give you a 2 for essentially missing the point is beyond me. As has been the case for much this cycle, if my issue with Clinton is trust, with Obama it's the inability to address the very issue he's now facing- the GOP.  This diary  points out to you that in your obession over Clinton you miss who actually is the enemy here. I really don't know if anything will get you to understand this at this point- McCain is the enemy. His hands are all over this. You can certainly continue to pretend that this is about Clinton. BUT, you aren't helping Obama, and its not the estimation of others that's at issue- if Obama's ability to identity the right target for attack, there is reason for concern.

Obama hasn't been around long enough to be historically underestimated.  That's the whole problem, isn't it?  He hasn't been around long enough in national politics to understand what he was in for.  A couple of easy contests against the likes of loony Alan Keyes is no preparation for a presidential run.

No silly, it won't be good enough for America.  Obama is trying to do something that he just cannot do.  It is so obvious to me, but the Obama supporters live in an alternate universe where black is white.  You just do not understand the white fear very well.  Black America has traditionally hated white America and those white Americans know it.  This has brought this thing to an ugly head, it is not Hillary's fault.  I get so sick of the Obama supporters trying to blame anything on her, as if she is the one stirring even this thing.  She is not!! This is Obama and his pastor who brings this thing out in the ugly open to fester.

Did you see that guy on SNL saying "bitch may be the new black but black is the new president, bitch?"  You may think that is funny, but not to a vast swath of white America it is not.  They hear those words and fear sneaks up their spine.  This issue will not go away.  In fact these hard lines will continue to be drawn.  Obama cannot overcome them with a speech for Gods sake, get real here.  Not everyone is so enthralled with Obama and those who are not, will not vote for him.  Ever.

Prediction: Obama will serve up a speech that is personal, wrough with candor and grace, and will cause the issue to go away in the minds of the MSM...

Please, tell me that you don't really believe this.

The MSM will never let this issue go.  When it comes time to vote in the general election, the MSM will have pounded this issue so hard and so often that every person in this country will know those speeches by heart.

Have you not noticed how controlled the media has become over the last seven years?

You think it's bad now?  We haven't seen anything yet.

Jerome maintains a sense of reality, unlike, say, Markos.  DKos doesn't have a front-pager (well, maybe ONE out of a dozen total FPs, if I recall from the time I hung out there) who supports Clinton, but MyDD has several who support Obama.

Jerome, furthermore, doesn't shriek and screech in gleeful screeds against Obama.  Can't say the same for Markos and Clinton.

Hillary beats McCain 51% to 46% outside the margin of error.  You don't want to realize it, this is not Hillary's doing, it is Obama's fault.  You cannot blame her for these feelings out there.  This will only get worse and worse, these lines are getting harder and harder.

I'm pretty sure this isn't a direct quote.  It's Jerome's spin on what Axelrod said.

Then why does she keep making positive McCain comments?

Your take as usual lacks objectivity- who care what mydd's interpretation as you see it is. The point is that it's about McCain and the GOP attack machine, and yet, who do you focus on here in your post? Wrong priorities.

Well said.  Without quesion, this issue is a challenge for Obama, and even if well handled will cost him some votes going forward.  But it doesn't have to be anywhere as dire as Jerome and others are making it out to be.  

Also, I would note that objectively speaking there is quite a bit of hypocracy out there regarding Obama's association with a minister who has said some crazy stuff.  Take a look at the entire GOP, which is associated with hate-mongering crazies, as one point of comparison.  But more immediately, I'm confronted with statements on a weekly basis that I disagree vehemently with when I go to mass.  My attendance does not = agreement and about half of the church agrees with me on issues like abortion, which is referred to as murder by my church, and gay marriage.  

Strangely, it's a bigger deal when the pastor in question is black.  Don't get me wrong, he said messed up stuff that I disagree with, but so do lots of other folks associated with political figures.    

I completely agree, though it seems this is an unpopular view. He needs to defend Wright, not distance himself from him further. Everybody knows he felt close to him, and he can't pretend he's suddenly deciding not to.

We all need to be asking what Karl Rove would do. And the answer is that, just like with Hagee, they would embrace him and redefine him in a positive way. We've ALL got to get out of the bunker mentality that has cost us so very many elections. Start wagging the dog already.

KO.

It's often said that America has a short attention span.

I think they do - but that's not the same thing as a collective short-term memory loss.

So they'll digest this story in the usual, bite-size chunks.... This would have been problematic if happened April 21... or 3 days before the fall election.

Now?

Obama will handle it the same way he's handled everything else -- with cool and calm professionalism.  

This is, I think, the 5th?  6th?  time that Obama has been "finished"... yet, he keeps recovering, keeps rising above it.

I'm sure it's incredibly frustrating for his opponents - both to those that prefer to shiv him in the back from within his own party, and those that are across the aisle.

Not to mention Gennifer Flowers, or "draft dodging", or any of that. How many times did Bill Clinton's political career come to a dramatic end?  For that matter, how many times did Nixon's?  It's not like nobody ever successfully faces down an existential threat.  The flip side is that if/when Obama survives this, it's going to get a lot more difficult for his enemies to claim that he isn't tester, hasn't been vetted, that we don't really know anything more than the speeches and the commercials.  Since that's pretty much the whole argument against him so far, the Clintonites and Republicans better hope this one works.

This is a test for Obama.  It's an important one, but that's no excuse for acting as though he's failed it already.  The concern-trolling is an unfortunate side effect of a still waging civil war, one which makes the timing of this attack seem pretty ingenius for the right.  The GOP doesn't have to divide right now, they just have to conquer.  And here we are on the front lines letting them.

problem is , the UCC is considered pretty 'out there' by most Americans. I say that as someone is from the church. It's pro gay marriage, after all.

"It's possible to overplay what seems like a slam dunk"

That's quite true.  We've already seen the New York Times being forced into a retraction.  Obama has to be careful to play this correctly but so do his opponents.  If they get too gleeful, too forceful, they'll just open themselves up to attack, "Our economy is in deep trouble, we're stuck in Iraq, McCain wants to be there for 100 years and all these questions are about my preacher?"

Clinton's and McCain both have the problem that they can't openly push this.  Clinton because she would lose the AA vote in a general, McCain because it would destroy his above the fray image.  

Yes, McCain would have 527s but with this already being a story, that can't drive the narrative nearly as much.  When these things get vicious is when the press feels the need to cover the controversy.  In this case though, they'll feel like they've already done so.

If Obama can get beyond this in the next week or two - remember again that PA isn't until over a month and this has only been costing him some minor damage around the edges - it'll be hard for it to come up again in October in the same way.

I'm not completely naive.  This will cost Obama votes.  The good news though is that most of the votes he's losing are from people who were thinking about staying home instead of voting for McCain.

It's not an ideal situation, but the fact is that Obama still has lower negatives than Clinton at the peak of the story.  Unless there's another massive shoe to drop, they'll probably go back down.

Fingers crossed that Obama can come through in an hour.  

No, it is actually race...there has long been a real divide between poor blacks and poor whites. The Republican "majority" was made possible by drawing in whites who had nothing in common with Republicans except a sense of racial superiority and hatred of "secular humanists."

It is the fact that all the black people in the country are voting for Obama.  This is the frightening thing for White America.  This is what they fear.  Not Hillary but Obama.

So by all means, we should.... what?

Feed it?

Help flame it?

Emphasize and enforce it?

Take advantage of it?

Well said Zonl. This site has become a tear down Obama site to the exclusion of everything else.

In terms of content, I much prefer Kos, FireDog, TPM, ...

They are so popular though that the boards are difficult to partake in, which is why I pop in here.

Otherwise, I am pretty dissapointed in MyDD.  Way too many people here forget who the enemy is: Republicans.

I find that ironically, My DD is the mirror image of DKos. the only difference being that Obama supporters can have their voices heard here, over there, we're shouted down, called "paranoid" and troll rated out of existence in the diaries. THe point being that Clinton supporters can come here to get away from the poisoned well that Dkos has become lately.
What I hate more than anything is people saying they won't vote for Obama/Hillary if Obama/Hillary wins.
Why are we here fighting for people like Darcy Burner to get elected and then shooting ourselves in the foot by not getting a Democrat in the WH?
What is the matter with you people?

Do you want to spend the rest of your life and your children's lives in Iraq?

Do you want to see our Constitution spit on and ignored?

Do you want to see more federal bailouts of companies like Bear Stearns, while people are getting thrown out of their own homes?

Do you want to see two or possibly three more neo-cons on the Supreme Court?

Joe Lieberman as Sec State and Dick Cheney as Sec Def?

Think about the alternatives when you go to that booth in November.

It frightens me to contemplate 4 more years of Republicans and what it will do to this country.

It should frighten all of us.

I wish to hell he hadn't suspended.  Even if he were in a distant third, no one would be able to crow of "inevitablity" and "the math".

I pray for a divided party that can't agree on Obama or Hillary.  Enter JRE or Al Gore.

A guy can wish, can't he?