Is Obama inevitable?

My latest American Spectator column:

Evidence of conservative despair isn't hard to find nowadays in Washington."We're doomed!" one veteran communications operative of the Right exclaimed last week when I asked her to assess the current campaign. . . .
Are prospects really so bleak? Despite the dispirited state of the GOP, the ideological muddling of the McCain campaign, and the media accolades for Obama, it is far from a foregone conclusion that Hope and Change will triumph Nov. 4. . . .

Please read the whole thing. When I sent that out over Facebook this morning, a fellow journalist replied, "Hope is not a plan," and talked about the apparent lack of an anti-Obama strategy. To which I replied that I'm not a strategist (nobody's paying me for advice), but . . .

But if I were a strategist for Obama, I'd have screamed "hell, no" the minute I heard someone suggest this idiotic European trip idea. And if I were a strategist for McCain, I'm pretty sure I could come up with a way to play that trip to my candidate's advantage. Whether the actual strategists at the McCain campaign (you know, the geniuses with the six-figure salaries) see the same thing I see -- well, who knows?

Being a conservative journalist means that people feel entitled to give you grief for every stupid thing Republicans do. What I always say is, "Look, no Republican has ever asked me for advice. And every time I've volunteered advice, I've been ignored. I've got zero influence over what they do, and I'm as unhappy as you are, so don't complain to me."

If the geniuses with the six-figure salaries aren't earning their pay, that ain't my fault.

UPDATE: Philip Klein says his column about the worst-case scenario of an Obama presidency has been misinterpreted as an indifference to that possibility. I repond:

Phil, I hope I was not guilty of misrepresenting your views, but you've been in a lot of the same bull-session discussions as me, and you know that the Bright Young Minds of the Right are hardly in a panic over the prospect of an Obama presidency. If George W. Bush has been president since you were in college, and if you were in middle school when Republicans captured Congress, it is understandably difficult for you to remember what it was really like the last time Democrats controlled everything in Washington. So while I don't mean to say you've got a "who cares" attitude, a lot of your peers do have that attitude, and it's not hard to see why. . . .

Go read the rest of that, too.