Indiana's junior senator, Democrat Evan Bayh, recently visited New Hampshire to weigh his prospects for a 2008 presidential run. He was flattened by crowds running to see Obama, and dropped out.
What was Obama saying that other centrists would not have? Absolutely nothing.
Obama talked about ending the nastiness in Washington and taking personal responsibility, and that government can't solve all problems -- platitudes emptied of all controversy. If anything, his colleagues from Indiana would surely have offered more exciting commentary.
Obama's appeal comes not from the things he says, but from who is saying them. He scores as an exotic who talks of barbershops and church socials in the flat tones you'd expect from any son of the prairie.
Had Bayh been half-Kenyan and raised in Hawaii by white grandparents from Kansas, he too would have become a political star, at least for the month of December. But he is a conventional white man. When Bayh speaks in the quiet Midwestern way, he gets tarred as lackluster.
Obama is a DLC Democrat disguised as a liberal populist. Hopefully Democrat voters will see through this facade and vote for someone else in the 2008 primaries.
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