Get That Man a Drink!

When Ulysses Grant's star was beginning to rise, another general cautioned Lincoln that Grant was a drunkard, earning the reply, "well I wish Grant would send a barrel of his whiskey to every other general in the Army."

On that note, it seems like Team McCain is starting to find its groove after months of tiptoeing around Obama, Chuck Hagel-style. First the "celebrity" commercial, now this:



I don't know if Obama has a sense of humor about himself--Ford, Reagan and both Bushes certainly did, as did Bill Clinton (at least in public), and towards the end even poor Hill was starting to look a little more human. Nixon and Carter, not so much, John Kerry only haltingly so, while Algore seems like the kind of guy whose idea of humor is when you realize you put on the red tie with blue stripes instead of the blue tie with red stripes by mistake. Given that the present hour has a whiff of the 70s about it, perhaps Obama will abide.

But his response to the "celebrity" ad--to preemptively shriek "racist!" over an ad that isn't even playing that sport--suggests brittleness, and it's a concern that is substantive as well as stylistic. POTUS is a job that, done properly, entails letting a veritable Niagara Falls slide off your back. There are a host of senators, congressmen, governors, secretaries, not to mention foreign leaders, who will gladly seize on any means available to throw you off your game. Humorless, imperious gasbags tend to make bad leaders whose flaws are all too easily exploited.

Today is August 1, and we have been saying "it's still early in the campaign" for so long that it is almost reflexive, but we are now a lot closer to the beginning of the end than the end of the beginning. With 13 weeks to go, Obama has a lot of growing-up to do.