Apparently his strategy for victory is to rely on his undoubted open-faced good looks and his high natural intelligence. Men have certainly been elected with less. (e.g. Warren Harding). They have also been elected with more (e.g. about 35 of the other 42 presidents).

Presumably he believes that his life is an open book (if a short one). For his sake, I hope it is. But even if he has lived a blameless life (as I presume he has), in the coming months his opponents will be busy scribbling in their own addendums. One opponent in particular is surrounded by a team of operatives who, over long and successful careers, have mastered the art of drawing mustaches on their opponents.

If Hillary Milhous Clinton begins to believe that Sen. Obama is a threat to her inheritance of the White House -- it will not be long before his own mother will not recognize the public image that Hillary's operatives will have drawn of him. He could ask Paula Jones (and all the other innocent women "her husband" attempted to seduce and abandon), or Ken Starr (one of the nation's most admired jurists before he was assigned to investigate "her husband."

Or consider my old boss Newt Gingrich -- Clinton's primary political opponent in the 1990s. Clinton's IRS very publicly opened an investigation of Newt for tax fraud. They kept it open for years, and then, a few weeks after he retired, the IRS quietly announced the investigation was complete and he was innocent. But not before Democrats spent years using that phony investigation as a basis for calling Newt a tax cheat. That's the way the Clintons play the game. They call it the policy of personal destruction. For Obama's sake, I hope he is ready for the game he is so anxious to get into.

At the other end of the field, the left-wing activist base is already questioning his lack of convictions. In The Huffington Post earlier this week, Nation magazine's David Sirota wrote an article entitled "The Ridiculousness and Danger that is Obama '08": " ... [H]e doesn't actually seem to aspire to anything outside of the Washington power structure ... and doesn't seem to be interested in challenging the status quo in any fundamental way ... Obama is a candidate who has kept his record deliberately thin, who has risked almost nothing for the bigger movement, and ... has gone out of his way to reinforce dishonest stereotypes about the left ... " And those were some of the kinder statements that can be found on the aroused left.

But I'll say this for Sen. Obama. If, over the next 25 months, the young paladin can fend off Hillary's bad boys, Arianna's crazy boys and the GOP's back room boys, he may in fact be ready for the big game against Bin Laden's murderous boys.