Jennifer Rubin makes a pretty good point:
Obama claims that experience is not as important as “judgment” or “change.” By manufacturing or existing accomplishments, however, he suggests that he does not buy his own pitch.
Rather, his repeated attempts to bolster his resume indicate that he may be nervous about his non-existent record of achievement. Not trusting that voters will buy his disparagement of experience, Obama is now resorting to a common, but risking tactic of under-qualified job-seekers: fudge the resume.
Resume fraud carries grave risks. If the employer finds out you are lying, you are unlikely to get the job, even if the competition is weak. And for Obama, who is already belaboring under an avalanche of tough press about his many policy flip-flops, he hardly needs another storyline which sheds doubt on his credibility and character.
I think that it’s things like this that are the reason the polls now seem to be even, even with the media love affair continuing.
[Update a while later]
Victor Davis Hanson lists some of Senator Obama’s other problems:
Obama has a poor grasp of history, geography, American culture, and common sense — whether the number or location of states in the Union, basic facts about WWII or where Arabic is spoken, or his sociological take on Pennsylvania, etc. His advisors realize this, and are playing 4th-quarter defense by keeping him out of ex tempore, non tele-prompted hope and change venues, where his shallowness can manifest itself in astonishing ways.
I was just listening to NPR in the car, and Terry Gross was interviewing Ryan Lizza on Fresh Air. He just had a long piece in the New Yorker about Obama’s Chicago history. He was talking about the Rezko housing project problems, and he said that Obama didn’t seem to be involved in the corruption, that the worst you could say about him was that exercised bad judgment.
Well, that in itself is saying something pretty bad, given that his claim to the presidency is that, while he may not have as much experience as his opponents, he has good judgment. But was his Rezko involvement good judgment? Was his attending a bigoted church for twenty years good judgment? Was it good judgment to pre-declare the surge a failure before it even began? So now it’s hard to make a case for either his experience or his judgment.
I know that the Senator believes that to know him is to love him, but I think he may find out that as the campaign actually engages after the conventions, the more people learn about him, the less inclined they’ll be to make him the next commander-in-chief.