The pregnancy of Bristol Palin, McCain’s vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s daughter, will not affect the race. If anything, it will remind some independent-minded mothers of their own teen pregnancies (or their daughters’), and will only bond them to soon-to-be grandmother Palin. But it will probably also turn off a comparable number of christian wingnuts, so in the end, no win-no lose.

(The ‘QUICK’ is a new feature, to offer an opinion on a matter in a fast way. You will be seeing more of these. It’s sort of neo-Twitter – which is cool, and why? Because any word with the keyword ‘neo’ in front of it, is hot!)

Back from my holidays in Morocco and Spain (it was fun, thank you – we sorta followed the ‘Moorish Trail’), and lo and behold! Barack Obama no longer seems to be in the lead. As the electoral college polls over at the (pro-GOP) Realclearpolitics.com and (more neutral) Fivethirtyeight.com websites show, John McCain has closed the gap. Obama needs to get worried.

The reasons why Obama is losing? It ain’t rocket science:

1. He has not been able to convince voters that he’s made of the right stuff.
2. People doubt him.
3. He’s black. (Well, sorta.) Which doesn’t help, not in the USA anyway.
4. They’re Americans; they can’t handle the truth!

In short, the four reasons that have been toiling in the back of my head ever since Obama became the Democratic candidate-in-waiting.

It also proves another thing: The Media have blown Obama’s candidacy way out of proportion. While the M Crowd was busy salivating over a black presidential candidate, they completely seemed to miss out on the fact that, according to the polls, many voters didn’t share their blinding enthusiasm.

There were some political junkies in the national press corps who were largely able to keep their Obamania-levels low. Kudos to Ben Smith and Glenn Rush, both of Politico.com, Mark Halperin of Time’s The Page, and Jake Tapper, the main man of ABC’s Political Punch.

Okay, so what’s next? It’s going to be Obama week, all week. First, he announces his pick for the veep slot. Sure, he might have offered it to Hillary, like even Ralph Nader predicted – but what, Bubba, if she turned it down, with an eye on 2012….?

Questions, questions. Anyway, Obama will be announcing his pick, which is sure to lead to at least 48 hours of Obamanews. Watch for nasty attacks from right-wing quarters, in an effort to divert Obama’s limelight.

Then, after the veep announcement, the Democrats will hold their convention. Yet another 72 hours (or so) of across the board Obamanews. Watch for nasty… Oh well, you get the drill.

Will it result in a bounce for Obama? Nope. Yes, he’ll give a grandiose speech and The Media will remind you for several days how incredibly special it is to have the First Black Candidate for the presidency, and that it’s history being made, etcetera, and so on.

But because of reasons 1, 2, 3 and 4, the bounce – if there is one at all – will be minimal. If Obama doesn’t close the deal before the end of September, the Clinton Wolfpacks will smell blood. Obama’s shining light will fade, especially if McCain does manage a small bounce.

Because then The Media’s big story will be “John McCain, The Comeback Grandpa”. And that would constitute Reason 5.

There’s a strategy in nuclear war, believe it or not, that’s called Bravo-Romeo-Delta. The B stands for ‘blunting’, R for ‘retardation’, and D for ‘disrupting’. A blunting attack means that you’re trying to blunt the opposition’s capacity to strike you, retardation means you’re trying to take out your opponent’s communication infrastructure, and disruptive means you’re going all-out, in an effort to destroy your opponent’s means to conduct war. The Delta-stage is usually the last, and most destructive phase of nuclear conflict.

Over at RealClearPolitics, the GOP-leaning Tom Bevan looks at Barack Obama’s chances in getting 7 ‘red states’ to come over to his column. Bevan doubts that Obama’s strategy will work. But that’s beside the point. Obama’s campaign team is trying to ‘Bravo-Romeo-Delta’ the McCain team all at once. And the reason is that Obama simply has more money to buy ammunition, and the timeframe to do it.

Team Obama is aiming at seven red states to rake in, come november. Some states come across as viable targets, like Virginia and Indiana – both reddish states but with old industrial cities, where manufacturing jobs have disappeared fast in the past eight years.  A lot of people in those states are very angry with the Republican thugs that have trashed the US for all those years. Time for payback. In these two states, Obama stands a reasonable chance.

Normally, Indiana would not be in play. The people of the good Hoosier State are usually okay with voting Democrat when it comes to local politicians and even members of Congress, like Representatives and Senators. Evan Bayh, for instance. But Indiana normally votes GOP for the presidency. (I dunno, perhaps they want their presidents to have a destructive streak.)

But the other five states seem long shots. North Dakota, North Carolina, Montana, Georgia and Alaska aren’t exactly Democrat Land. Au contraire. So, Bevan concludes, Team Obama is hoping that it can lure Team McCain in spending some of his meagre funds in those states, therefore allowing him less money to spend in battleground states like Ohio and Florida.

Now flip the coin, and you can see why some McCain operatives must be getting restive over Obama’s spending spree in those seven states anyway, and regardless of Bevan’s arguments. The RealClearPolitics electoral college aggregate poll is revealing. The RealClearPolitics-count is 238 electoral votes for Obama, and 163 for McCain.

Count out the tossup states, and it’s still 322 votes for Obama, and 216 for McCain. People have so far been glaring at the popular national vote polls, which show the race between Obama and McCain increasingly tighten. But that’s not what either David Plouffe (Obama strategist) or McCain’s strategist Rick Davis are looking at.

Their eyes are fixed on the electoral college vote. So far, those numbers have been consistent, regardless of the national popular vote aggregate. Obama  has a pretty sizeable buffer to play around with that fantastic asset, like anyone with a lead in any election: time.

The situation on the battlefield is that Obama simply has more guns to fire, and the time to move them around. McCain has fewer guns and more ground to cover. He’s already racing around the country, hopping from state to state, and is dedicating his time almost exclusively to the local media. That’s telling, because that’s the kind of flying around candidates usually do to either pre-empt holes, or plug them in the last month or so.

The reason: even if Bevan is right and Obama in the end only gets two out of seven states, he will still have gained two states that are normally not in play for any generic Democrat. Even winning one state, Indiana, would be a hoot. And it would still mean that McCain had to have been on the defensive offense all the time, demanding too much of his overstretched artillery, while Obama’s guys are blasting them from every side.

And then there’s the foot soldiers. The mantra of the 2004 election was ‘ turnout, turnout, turnout’. Team Bush, of whom many people have now joined the McCain campaign, knew that a lot of Democratic-leaning voters were fired up to vote Bush out of office. So the GOP boosted its get out the vote-machine to levels never seen before. They managed to squeeze out approximately 60,000 more Bush-voters in Ohio after a very polarising campaign.

After they managed to tarnish John Kerry’s image as a war hero, the next step was reigniting feelings of fear among the electorate. Still, Bush almost lost and many of the 60,000 voters that gave him a second term had been canvassed incessantly by the Bush campaign machine. Oh, and the local political machine too – Ohio had a GOP governor, and thus blatantly GOP administrative infrastructure.

Polls show that the Bush foot soldiers of 2004 are no longer as motivated now as they were in 2004, and the political machine of Ohio has changed hands. Democrats run the place.

The same thing goes for states like Virginia and Indiana, but there’s a catch: in 2004, the GOP didn’t really need to build up big, expensive GOTV infrastructures in those two states. They will need to do so now; they simply cannot afford to take the chance of losing either one of them to Obama.

Team McCain is also betting on the GOP itself to help out their presidential candidate. That may be, but locally, the GOP is in problems. There’s not a whole lot of money to spare in the GOP congressional coffers, so the candidates won’t be very eager to share what little cash they have with McCain. And they will be even less inclined should Team Obama succesfully carry out another strategic attack: that of throwing McCain in with Bush.

If Obama succeeds in painting McCain as a Bush Republican, something which isn’t hard to do as McCain has embraced nearly all Bush policies, few Republican state candidates will want to infect themselves with the bad image.

So. Obama has the money, the ammunition, he has the time to place his artillery and foot soldiers wherever he wants them to, and that while he is in the position to paint the new general of the opposing army as a cardboard copy of the last general that lost a big battle.

Once again, this election is Obama’s to lose. With all he has going for him, we’ll see where he stands in three weeks, when I return from my holidays.

Yesterday, I wrote an article called ‘Deconstructing Obama’. In it, I gave a very short rundown of the only strategy that seems to be left to McCain: go personal. The reason being that Obama has had the initiative since day one, it seems.

But perhaps I was wrong. The tracking polls are starting to show dents in Obama’s armour. Over at Real Clear Politics (I’m always careful with these guys as they’re clearly pro-GOP), the latest rundown of tracking polls shows that although Obama is still leading, the margins seem to be getting smaller, not bigger.

That spells trouble for Obama. Of course, Americans being Americans, I would not be surprised if they once again elect someone who will tear their country even further apart. Because that’s what Republicans do: they pretend to be all Christian morals, but before you know it, they’re out with TV-ads calling people traitors and sodomizing your 3-year-old.

Either way, Obama has not yet been able to close the deal and I’m afraid that that’s because people are still very doubtful of him. Of course, American pigheads being American pigheads, they keep noticing that Obama is black. Perhaps that’s it. It can’t be because of ideological reasons. Because how many average Americans read candidate platforms these days?

I‘ve said from day one, so even before the primaries, that Americans were very capable of electing a carbon copy of George W Bush into office. I also predicted that the election would be very close.

When the new King of Expectation beat the Oracle of Chappaqua, I said I was convinced that any generic Republican would win the election. Now, I’m going back to that position. I’ll be keeping it until Obama truly starts improving his poll numbers and significantly moves away from McCain.

John McCain is on the offensive, and for all the wrong reasons. He has to find a way to dent Obama’s armor. For all intents and purposes, Obama is able to keep the initiative, constantly forcing his adversary to react and take on a defensive position. He is almost constantly asked by the media to respond to new Obama ploys.

In an effort to break that spell, McCain seems to have started a new offensive, directly attacking Obama’s persona. That puts him right where team Obama wants him. Unless something odd happens: if this continues, Obama will win the election.

John Nichols of thenation.com is getting a bit infatuated with Barack Obama. That’s fine, a lot of journalists are being sucked in. John McCain should stop bitching about it – he was yesterday’s sweetheart for a long time, but that’s what he is. Yesterday’s news, just like Hillary Clinton was.

So it was refreshing to see Nichols criticizing Obama for a change in an article pasted here, but unfortunately, Nichols missed the mark. He was right to criticize Obama, but for the wrong reason.

Both Barack Obama and John McCain are right: more troops are needed in Afghanistan, but with one unifying mandate, not two different ones that cancel each other out. As is currently the case.

So I wrote Mr Nichols an email. To which he didn’t respond, of course.

Dear Mr Nichols,

I read your article on the commitments Mr Obama made to Afghan leaders, on TheNation.com.

Fine article, good read, but I felt that some points were missing.

Like many people, you correctly state that there’s too much fighting going on, and not much building.

But that’s exactly the problem; the deployment to Afghanistan has become a chicken-or-the-egg dilemma.

As you know, the American troops are basically on a fighting mission named ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’, in Afghanistan. Their mandate is combat, and only combat.

Then there’s NATO’s ISAF, that has a very different mandate for the troops. ISAF is confined to (re)building, nation building, etc.

All good and well, but all the Afghans and the Taleban see are Western military uniforms.

Aside from that, the Taleban are very effective in applying what is basically an African tribal strategy. Instill fear, fear and fear among the civilian population, and ensure that the (re)building effort by NATO fails.

Their tactics are horrendous, and well documented by Dutch soldiers, who have been in Afghanistan since the start.

The biggest frustration of Dutch soldiers is that whenever they build a school or small hospital in a small rural town, the Taleban usually sneak into the town after the Dutch have left, and then raze the schools and hospitals. Those who have cooperated with the Dutch are killed, and often their entire families as well. They are public executions; young boys and girls are hanged up on their feet, so upside down, and then gutted, like one would with a cow. The warning is clear to the villages in close proximity: this is what happens to you when you cooperate with ISAF.

Dutch soldiers are now being spurned by local Afghan leaders. They would like to cooperate, but they say they can’t, because the Dutch (and other forces) won’t always be there to protect them.

In the beginning, ISAF troops made the error of promising Afghans that they were safe from the Taleban, that they’d be protected. Years of experience has shown the Afghans that those promises are empty.

And to Afghans, he who controls an area, rules that area. It’s that simple.

Another problem is the ISAF mandate. NATO troops are in Afghanistan, yes, but they’re there under a tight mandate. They are in principle not allowed to undertake offensive action against (known) Taleban forces. They are allowed to defend themselves, and the civilian population, but that’s it.

Dutch Special Forces have now taken to baiting tactics; they try to attract enemy fire, by for instance sending a lone jeep with soldiers into a known ‘hot zone’ and then faking that the jeep has a breakdown. Taleban spotters, often civilians whose family members have been taken hostage by the Taleban and so forced to enroll into their ranks, then go into action. All they usually do is call in the location of the jeep – but the talk via open walkie-talkie radio is then intercepted by the Dutch, the location of the civilian spotter located, and he is subsequently killed.

The Taleban then later show up, collect the remains, and present them to the inhabitants of the killed civilian’s town, exclaiming the perverse violence of the ISAF troops.

A couple of months ago, a Dutch TV programme comparable to ’60 Minutes’ found out that Dutch troops had started undertaking offensive action, to flush out the Taleban that had been systematically razing schools and hospitals in towns. The broadcast caused a political outcry. As a result, the Dutch forces are now back to full defensive ISAF duty. And they’re frustrated, because the results of their rebuilding efforts are nil.

This is happening throughout ISAF-‘controlled’ territory. Taleban attacks on the civilian population and ISAF troops are up. The number of hospitals, schools and medical posts in villages being razed is up. Production of poppies, the sale of which is probably the Taleban’s main source of income, is up by record numbers. And the ISAF troops are, by their mandate, not allowed to do anything about it.

Then Operation Enduring Freedom. US forces are fighting the Taleban hard, but there are two problems.

1) the population of the villages they half destroy while bombing Taleban troops who purposely take up positions in those villages, are VERY unlikely to aid the Americans and be anti-Taleban, and
2) the Taleban are constantly withdrawing to Pakistan, where GIs can’t touch them. (Eerily reminiscent of the VietCong’s retreat tactics into Laos and Cambodia.)

So US forces are doing something that the ISAF can’t – fighting offensive – but not doing what they should be doing after the fighting, which in turn is what ISAF is doing.

There are two main strategic problems.
1. Geographic divide. There are areas where the NATO ISAF troops simply are not allowed to operate.
This is Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) territory. This results in OEF GIs flushing out the Taleban from a village, and then moving on, with no ISAF troops following up to do the rebuilding – and staying there for a while to ensure that Taleban troops don’t sneak back in. Plus: Pakistan.

2. Mandate divide. As shown, the two operations have very different mandates. Problem is, if you change the ISAF mandate to allow for offensive (i.e., more risky) actions, most NATO countries will pull back their troops. (The Dutch had to extend their ISAF mandate period because no other NATO country wanted to send troops to replace the Dutch.)

The only way to solve this:
- ONE mandate, for all forces in Afghanistan.
- MORE troops, to ensure that newly built infrastructure (which is why ISAF’s there, for Christ’s sake!) isn’t immediately razed after the troops depart.

So far, both Obama’s and McCain’s proposals fall short of the mandate-thing.