Reply #1: He's on right now here in Australia.

[TheMadMonk]

Burried in his opening monolougue was this little gem. War in Iraq is costing 4 Billion Dollars per week. a cool 400,000 dollars per minute.

Unfortunately He just put up what is suppoesed to be a satire of a Hillary '08 commercial, her vs. Obama.

Essentially it goes like this:

Screen: OBAMA. (Fills screen)
Voicover: "Look at this."
Screen: OSAMA repalces Obama in (I think) a subtly bigger font.
Screen: Hillary '08 Logo. (Flag + name)
Voicover: "Vote for Hillary Clinton. She is not one letter away from a terrorist."

Some satire. A blatant attempt to set up guilt by association. Flag patriotism trigger. Reinforcement.

And now he's taking O'leily apart while they call it a geme between friends. Yet at the same time, he's giving the "Iraq is bad" meme a serious hammering.

Is he schizoid(sp?) or Cleaning up the Republicans. Get this bunch sorted (ie. gone). But at the same time subtly altering perceptions in people's minds, (minds like ours) so if it ever comes down to a contest between the two, minds might have this niggling little feeling of disquiet when they see Obama's name.

Of the two, Hillary is the more easily defeated candidate, she raises a lot of hackles, while Obama is virtually a reincarnation of Honest Abe. Not perfect by any means, but a political paragon of virtue nonetheless. He might well prove to be an insurmountable problem to King George's replacement amongst the swing and observant/major issue voters.

In fact he might well be a disaster to the Republican party. A black candidate would arguably give a huge boost to African-American voter registration. Which would be huge boost to Democrats across the board.

And any widespread electoral "shenanigans" are likely to cause a certain amount of civil unrest AND if it looks like the presidency was stolen from a black man, I suspect Watts would pale into insignificance. So any race with Obama in it would have to be an honest one in an electoral sense however dirty in gets on the campaign trail. And Ford is showing that the Redneck vote can't swing it any more.

Obama might well be every Republican's nightmare. Possibly even moreso to the honest ones if the current leadership retains overall control of the party. He could easily grab a significant chunk of the Republican vote if the party fields any sort of warhawk, a highly probable occurence.