Matt Yglesias is down on Obama

There's perhaps no holder of comparable office who's had less experience tangling with the Republican Party than Barak Obama. This worries me.

Who had more experience tangling with the Republicans after umpteen years fighting it out on the Senate floor than Kerry and Gore? All that experience didn’t seem to help them much when it came right down to it. How about JFK or Clinton—they seemed to do pretty well with relatively little experience.

Obama is my top pick for 2008—next Feingold then Gore then Clark then Dean (who won’t run). The rest should stay the hell out of the race—especially Clinton and Kerry, since they could potentially do the most damage to the Democrats' chances.

We need politicians who do what they believe is right without sticking a finger to the wind every ten seconds. This is a little Colbertesque, but my gut tells me Obama is the one. And I don’t really know why people I respect in the leftosphere are dissing him right now. I know he’s been appealing to the center like crazy, he got owned by McCain earlier this year in a minor kerfluffle, and he has talked about how Democrats should reach out more to people of faith. To me this means he is a smart politician.

I’m having visions of how he could lay waste to the competition in a general election—except for McCain. For all their hangups about McCain, I think the Republicans will be smart enough to know he is their only chance in 2008. And I think Gore and Obama are the only two who could—either of them—beat him. Better if they ran together.