Decision 2008!

Last night Barack Obama clinched the Democrat nomination with his primary victories in South Dakota and Montana, as well as more superdelegate commitments. Hillary Clinton now cannot get enough delegates to win, and even without her concession the media and punditocracy have crowned Obama the de facto nominee. At last we have the 2008 presidential matchup: John McCain and Barack Obama.

Wooooooooooo!

Hey, wake up! Stay with me here. I know not everyone is interested in politics, but this is history. It's no longer the same story of two rich, boring white men battling it out for the right to interrupt Lost with his primetime speeches. We've got a genuine war hero in McCain, who is a Naval Academy graduate, was a fighter pilot, and endured over five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. And we have a genuine black man in Obama, who has been black all his life. Let's see what each candidate brings to his party:

Senator Obama is the most far-left candidate the party has nominated in recent memory. He's not like Bill Clinton, who tried to out-conservative George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole in his two presidential campaigns, spearheaded welfare reform, and spent much of his presidency working with a Republican-led Congress. Obama, by contrast, has worn his liberalism like a badge of honor during his brief career in the Senate. Furthermore, he is an incredible speaker, and his message of Hope! and Change! is inspiring and attractive, even if it may be shallow. If he wins, he'll also have a strong Democrat-led Congress, making him the first president so easily able to implement liberalism since LBJ. If Democrats want a candidate who can advance their values, this man is it.

Senator McCain, on the other hand, is a pariah to his party. He won the nomination via cross-over voters from other parties, independents, and moderates. To put it bluntly, if he wanted to come out of the closet and publicly embrace liberalism, just about the only thing that would change is the (R) behind his name. After his failed presidential bid in 2000, he returned to the Senate and positioned himself as the anti-Republican: the "maverick" who opposed the party line and shunned the conservative base by, among other things, championing amnesty for illegal immigrants and working out a limp-wristed compromise deal with Democrats over their filibustering of the president's judicial nominees. At the end of that ordeal he proudly stated that he kept "the Senate back from going over a precipice" by preserving "the rights of the minority." That marked an odd point in Senate history when the minority party was suddenly afforded the "rights" to say how the majority party conducted business. The whole filibuster fiasco destroyed McCain's already fragile conservative credentials, and threw him over a different precipice -- this time with the party base. It made him the most hated senator among conservatives since Jumpin' Jim Jeffords switched parties and gave Democrats the majority in 2001.

And as for his speaking abilities... alright, he's not the most inspiring of speakers, but we can live with that, right? George W. Bush stumbled and stammered his way through two terms. And then there's his age. If he wins he'll be the oldest man ever elected to the presidency, just shy of 130 years old. But Ronald Reagan was the oldest man ever elected to the presidency, and things turned out alright for God please don't strike me down for comparing McCain to Reagan.

Honestly, I don't think Obama should be hard to beat, because Americans as a whole do not elect to the presidency unabashed liberals who do not at least bring the rhetoric to the right. But if anyone can lose to Barack Obama, it's John McCain.