All of which makes Barack Obama's candidacy look increasingly tenuous. When Obama was nominated, his two major policy selling points were opposition to the war in Iraq and hard-core environmentalism. At the time, those policies looked like a road to success in the general election.
But times have changed. The war in Iraq is going well, thanks to the surge promoted by McCain. Obama has struggled to deal with this on-the-ground reality, thickly suggesting instead that had his immediate withdrawal strategy been pursued, the situation on the ground would be even better in Iraq. Obama's McGovernite anti-war position and his refusal to acknowledge the great work done by our troops now puts him on the wrong side of history.
The real killer for Obama, however, is his deep green environmentalism. Obama opposes drilling -- or at least he did until this week. And Americans don't trust that Obama has completely overcome his knee-jerk anti-drilling attitudes.
For Obama, his biggest strength -- opposition to the war in Iraq on both security grounds and on grounds that it was a war for oil -- now constitutes his biggest weakness. His biggest problem is that the war in Iraq wasn't about oil. If it had been, perhaps he'd still be leading in the polls.