The Race.

So for a while now, my brother and I have been arguing/discussing the issue of where Obama stands in the Presidential race, and where he should be. You have obviously read about this on other blogs, and in other parts of the MSM. The argument goes something like, "A generic democrat would win handily this year, why is Obama struggling?"

There are obviously two sides to the coin. Obama is actually way ahead of where Kerry was four years ago. On September 16, 2004, John Kerry was trailing Bush in the estimated electoral college (EEC) 311-223. As you can see looking at the graphic to the right, currently Obama trails McCain by a much smaller magin, 252-238. However, as pollster Scott Rasmussen points out, the Democratic candidate almost needs to get to 50% in the popular vote to win the presidency (without Ross Perot involved). Even in the most favorable tracking poll, the left-leaning DailyKos' Research 2000 survey, he has only 48% support.

It is usually at this point when I snap into my chicken little routine and my brother has to talk me off the ledge. His main comeback is that it took Obama from February of 2007 to December of 2008 to finally connect with Iowa voters, and that he was down by 10 percent with a month to go before winning by 7-percentage points. He argues that Obama peaked at the right time in Iowa and will do it again in the general election.

Iterestingly enough, it took Barack 10 months to connect with Iowa voters, the same amount of time he has from his Iowa victory (when he was thrust onto the national stage) to the election in November. And if there is any doubt that he connected with the Iowa voters, a look at recent state polling compared to Iowa (a state that went for Bush in 2004) polling, shows that Obama is running very strongly there and has connected with the 94.6% white population.

But does the argument hold water? Specifically, is there any reason why Obama is less than 50 days away from the election and still failing to connect with voters? There is one obvious issue, and it does not take an episode of the Cosby show to explain it.

Just today, on the front page of Drudge, under the headline 'Race War!' Matt Drudge links to an article by Fatimah Ali of the Philadelphia Daily News where she references a previous article where he again linked to her with an inflammatory headline. Simultaneously, CNN links to an article on Time Magazine's website about what it calls the elephant in the room.

As Michael Grunwald writes in his Time piece:

Over the past 18 months, Obama has been attacked as a naive novice, an empty suit, a tax-and-spend liberal, an arugula-grazing élitist and a corrupt ward heeler, but the only attacks that clearly stung him involved the Rev. Jeremiah Wright — attacks that portrayed him as an angry black man under the influence of an even angrier black man. White America has shown an abundant willingness to support no-demands blacks like Tiger Woods, Oprah Winfrey, Colin Powell and Will Smith, but a race man like Malcolm X would be another story ... Obama's opponents want him to look niche, like BET or Chris Rock or the NBA; his challenge is to prove that he's also attractive to the ABC and Dane Cook and MLB crowds.

While I personally believe that NASCAR-dads should have been substituted for "MLB-crowds," I think his basic point is a valid one. America does not wan't some crazy Black guy running amok in the White House. Grunwald closes with, "White America already embraces black celebrities ... But it has never really warmed up to an angry one."

That's what changed in Iowa. They got to know Barack. They saw him, and heard him, and touched him, and he touched them. They realized that he is the one who came from a single-parent family, that he is the one who has worked for the middle-class his whole life. That unlike McCain, whose father gave him everything, Obama is someone who had to overcome significant hurdles to get where he is today. (And I am in now way diminishing McCain's POW status, that was obviously a hurdle, but by his own admission, that was the only adversity he ever faced as a young man.)

But mostly, the Obamas were able to show the Iowans that despite the color of their skin, they were JUST LIKE THEM. From the middle-class, for the middle-class. Race was irrelevant. In Iowa that took hold, propelled Obama to a victory and a significant lead in the general election. In other states there is still work to do. The moment West Virginians begin asking themselves, "If there was a candidate who grew up in the middle-class, with a single-mom, spent most of his adult life helping factory workers, and is now endorsed by every major union in America and he was White, would I vote for him?" Obama has won.