The Political Whore

Der Spiegel’s US presidential campaign correspondents seems to think so. Gabor Steingart writes in “The End of the Obama Revolution:”

The euphoria is gone, the friendly fire has started: Barack Obama is suddenly looking less like a superstar and more like just another candidate. His message isn’t hitting home with the three most important groups of voters: women, older Americans and blue-collar workers.

All of those people who’ve been dreaming of America’s first black president now have to slowly wake up. It’ll happen one day, hopefully, but not in this election. And perhaps his name will be Barack Obama. But that first black president will have a more mature personality than that which Obama, 46, can offer American voters today.The senator from Illinois has now lost two primaries, losses that have turned the former superstar back into an ordinary candidate. And after the CNN debate on Monday night, one thing is clear: Obama is a candidate under friendly fire.

It’s one thing to be under friendly fire; it’s another to be dead in the water. Still, since Iowa and the over-the-top press adulation, Obama has had precious little to cheer about. His campaign hypocritically put out a statement last week in which Obama reiterated that he will stand by his pledge not to campaign in Florida, and that the state’s voters don’t count anyway (since Florida was stripped of convention delegates) but had his website feature grassroots events in the Sunshine State, insisting that it wasn’t officially campaigning by just letting people know where they can go to hear about his candidacy. This week, the campaign’s hypocritical moment was running ads on a national CNN buy, which put his message into about 9 million homes in Florida. (Hillary’s was having her campaign jump all over the ad buy as if it disqualified Obama from being a member of the human race.)

Obama has plenty left in the tank, and I wouldn’t go as far as the German writer to begin inking his presidential obituary. But Steingart makes a very salient point when he points out the impact of Obama being hit with tough, direct questions by rival Hillary Clinton in the South Carolina debate:

A pop star who has to put up with such questions is no longer a pop star.

In other words, for some candidates, once the bubble has been burst, the public sees you differently and it becomes very, very difficult — if not impossible — to rebuild the previous image, the one that voters fell in love with. The media built a Barack Obama that was not entirely human and impossible for him to live up to.

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