Oh, the Buyer's Remorse! It burns us! it freezes!

I will admit to being One of Those Hillary Supporters. Even though I dutifully followed Sen. Clinton's call in June to get behind Obama, I didn't give up hope for Hillary until the actual Convention. Why, you may ask? I'll give the same answer I have been giving for nine months now: because Hillary Clinton is [would have been] the strongest Democratic candidate by a long shot, and the only candidate who can properly stand up to John McCain.

Of course, the Democratic elite (who Obama claims to be against, even though he is one of them) handed the nomination to Obama based on the mass media near-religious hype that grew up around his celebrity. Not to mention the overwhelming pressure from people not old enough to vote or who are entering the political arena for the first time in their lives (and who are about 80% likely to not vote come November.) In an election year where the incumbent Republican president has nearly bottom-out approval ratings and Democrats are in control of Congress and the social tide is turning away from failed Conservative policy... what a great idea: let's nominate the riskiest possible candidate, with the thinest resume, long associations with known terrorists, and whose main career accomplishments seem to be pitching for the Democratic nomination.

Now that it's too late, the Buyer's Remorse over Obama is rolling in. Everything from his premature victory lap around Europe (oh, I'm sorry, are you being elected President of Europe?). The major fumble of picking Biden over Clinton. The ever growing laundry list of flip-flops,. The tepid and hypocritical response to the Palin Storm. The blatant lying that there's nothing going wrong with the campaign. Obama's sudden apparent inability to respond to McCain without sounding petulant. What is quickly getting spun in the media is that Obama has no strategy, that he thought beating out Clinton (a fellow Democrat) was the main hurdle of the election, and once more, that characteristic aloofness are getting Sen. Obama in trouble. Even Joe Biden admitted recently Hillary Clinton was a stronger pick.

There's still time to turn it around, but Obama has already seriously fallen down by holding back on McCain-Palin's recent round of attacks. He's letting the opposition define him. He seems to have thought that all the old topics from the primaries were not going to come up again. The Obama brand is tarnished, and a serious re-tooling of the campaign message and the candidate's image need to happen, and happen now. Right now. Otherwise I'm afraid it's all done.