"Surrender!", they whined

With less than four weeks to go before the potentially pivotal Pennsylvania Primary, Barack Obama has announced that he will grace the state with his presence. On a bus tour.

Perhaps he simply intends to wave as the bus drives by. As the state has so far served as little more than a prop for Obama photo ops, a lot of us have been wondering if he's simply given up on Pennsylvania.

"Giving Up" seems to be a theme in the Obama strategy - or, at least, trying to convince the other guy to give up. The cry for Hillary Clinton to drop out of the race is rising up again from the Obama camp. Why? Because she has a double-digit lead over him in the Pennsylvania polls? Because Clinton stands to win this state? Because Obama doesn't have what it takes for the long slog to the White House? Somehow I don't think asking your opponent to drop out of the race will be a very effective strategy in the General Election.

Maybe Obama will be able to pull a last-minute come-from-behind victory, of the sort Rudolph Giuliani hoped to achieve in Florida. But I think if he loses in Pennsylvania, there will be a lot of post-hoc explanations given, most of them portraying Pennsylvanians as a bunch of blue-collar red-neck racist simpletons who embrace the past and reject the future. But the simple fact is this: Clinton and her team have campaigned relentlessly in Pennsylvania. Obama has barely bothered to show up.

If Obama wins the nomination, I will vote for him for President, and I will support him in the race. Because I believe either Democrat is infinitely preferable to a Republican candidate who will do little more than continue the failed policies of the current occupant of the Office of the President.

***

The illusion of Obama as a paragon of virtue far above the taint of negative campaigning is easily dispelled simply by getting on one of his mailing lists. I did, though I'm not quite sure how I did it. The e-mails started arriving on March 16, two days after I wrote this post and - more suspiciously - five days after I signed up for a Hillary Clinton mailing list at the grand opening of her headquarters in Scranton. Strangely, I haven't received any mailings from Hillary's camp yet. Gee whillikers, it's almost as if the list that I signed up for was actually used by Obama's people instead of Clinton's! But that would be wrong, wouldn't it?

On March 16 I received two e-mails from an Obama operative named Matthew Lehrich. The first e-mail informed me of a conference call I could "Dial-In" on (which I believe means "listen in on") at 1:00 - forty minutes after the e-mail arrived. I received a second e-mail later that day, then five more the next day, a single one on March 18 - and then the floodgates opened up. Six on 3/19, 5 on 3/20, 6 on 3/21, none on 3/23 or 3/24 (I guess they took the Easter weekend off), 9 on 3/24, 6 on 3/25, 9 on 3/26, 8 on 3/27, and 8 on 3/28. I've only received a single e-mail today. I've also been receiving e-mails from Sean Smith, another Obama person - two on 3/25 and one on 3/27.

I will admit that I haven't read all of these e-mails. Hell, I'm behind on responding to messages from my friends, so I can't really hope to keep up with floods of unsolicited e-mails from mailing lists I never signed up for. But just reviewing the subject lines indicates that twenty-two of these messages were primarily intended as anti-Clinton missives, not pro-Obama or anti-McCain.

Obama is also quite skilled at "playing the race card", as they say, but in a manner akin to that of Gambit, or Ricky Jay. (And if you actually needed to use either of those links to see who I was referring to, your education is sorely wanting - and I am happy to have broadened your horizons a bit.) He can play a race card by telling you he won't be playing a race card by telling you about how the other team's people have been playing race cards. That's pretty good, and darned convoluted.

Mark Cour of Wilkes-Barre Online had a chance to directly compare the Clinton and Obama camps during a recent quest for campaign buttons. The bottom line: he got some buttons from the Clinton people, but they tried to snag him into volunteering. The Obama people, however, would not give him buttons unless he made a cash "donation" - as a matter of policy. (He left without buttons.) But he tells the story much better than that. You can read about his adventure here.

Obama isn't head and shoulders above Clinton. As a friend once told me her sainted mother used to say, "One is as much in the muck as the other is in the mire." But, as was the case with that Saint of the Right, Ronald Reagan, it isn't sticking to one of them.

So far I've been leaning toward Clinton as the Democratic nominee. I didn't expect that when this game started out. Obama seemed like all charisma and somewhat refined (not exactly raw) talent, while Clinton seemed to have (as I once stated) the charisma of a jar of pickles. That opinion started to change when I actually saw (well, heard, through a P.A. system) Hillary speak in Scranton. It changed even more when I saw her bother to come and say hi to a few hundred people who didn't make it in to her speech, after having just spoken to a crowd of 3500 cheering supporters. When Chelsea came to town the very next day - bonus. And then Hillary again at the St. Patrick's Day Parade in Scranton, and then Bill in Wilkes-Barre. If you're willing to put that much effort into an area that all the pundits and pollsters say you've already got in your pocket, I'm impressed.

Obama, on the other hand, hasn't bothered much with campaigning in Pennsylvania. He's put more effort into other states with Primaries several weeks after Pennsylvania's.

Yet there is still an irrational hatred of all things Clinton in some quarters, matched by an equally irrational love for all things Obama. Not to say that there aren't things to dislike and/or love about both of the candidates, and plenty of people who dislike and love them with just cause. But I'm talking about the irrational manias that grip some people on both of these counts. And the inverse is less true - those who have an irrational love for Hillary Clinton and those who have an irrational hatred for Barack Obama are far fewer in number, or at least far less vocal.

So, having said all that, maybe Obama would be the better choice for the Democratic nominee.

This Primary is turning out to be a test of character, and strategy, and skill, and endurance. All of those things will be required of one of these candidates as President. How they acquit themselves now will give us clues as to how they will perform once elected.

If they get elected. If the supporters of whichever candidate does not win the party nomination do not decide to simply storm off and sulk on election day - or worse, choose to play spoiler by voting for McCain.

So: don't do that. And Obama supporters: please quit your whining about how Hillary should just drop out of the race. It ain't over until it's over. And we Pennsylvanians haven't had our say yet.