Jim Geraghty catches something today and makes an accurate observation:

If the President Had Said This, It Would Have Been a Bushism

“You know, it’s always a bad practice to say ‘always’ or ‘never.’” — Obama, speaking in Amman today.

Full transcript of Obama’s remarks here.

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The way Barack Obama is being treated by the media has gone well beyond parody. Nevertheless, I think that one can get too preoccupied with the triumphant pre-presidential world tour he is now on, and the way it is being covered. Photo-ops in July don’t win elections in November. Most of the people who matter in November’s election — the great unwashed swinging voters — are all but oblivious to political news at this stage. True, the images might be present in their peripheral vision and create this vague impression that Barack Obama is visiting trouble-spots and meeting with important people, which helps counteract or inoculate against the perception that he is inexperienced. However, there is way more than enough time between now and the election for alternative impressions to come to the fore.

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John McCain, it is said, is close to naming his choice for VP (or else he is gaming the media). I continue to believe that he needs to use his VP selection to assuage conservatives, many of whom are feeling pretty disenfranchised these days. He needs to pick someone who could be a straight-down-the-line conservative successor, rather than a “maverick” or a “moderate,” in order to give conservatives a kick to mobilize for November. (Why shouldn’t conservatives be thinking of 2012? Hillary is.) Some persist in saying that Mitt Romney would be the bone that conservatives want thrown to them. This is the thinking of numbskulls. If Mitt Romney were a solid conservative choice, he would have won the nomination. It’s as simple as that. His various flaws don’t need renumerating here and now, but he still has them, and he will not galvanize conservatives. Who will? Well, McCain got the nomination: that makes it his job to come up with the VP, not mine. It is for me merely to judge how well he did.

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A common theme of election commentary recently has been how close these two presidential candidates appear to be — relatively speaking — on the issues. This is due to McCain’s “moderation” to begin with, and then Obama’s recent attempts to tack to what people call the “center” on a variety of issues. To the extent that this is true, and to the extent that it becomes the perception of the electorate, it is bad news for John McCain. If people feel that both will do more or less the same thing on a variety of pressing issues, then the election becomes even more of a beauty contest than elections usually are. And Barack Obama will win a beauty contest.

Again: the election is neither being lost nor won in July. But the way that these perceptions eventually settle down will be crucial.

It reminds me of the fact that there are many who believe that John McCain — being a maverick moderate and all — is about the only Republican who could stand a chance of winning this November, given the unpopularity of President Bush and Republicans generally (put aside the fact that the Democratic-controlled congress is the most unpopular political entity of all). However, with the way that Obama is seeking to blur his positions just enough to seem pretty close to McCain’s, it suggests to me that the Republican party would ultimately have stood a better chance with a more straight-forward conservative, whose policy distinctions from Obama would have been much more crystal-clear. Think of energy, oil drilling, etc. But, it’s spilled milk. The Republican party just failed to generate the right conservative candidate, and McCain proved that tenacity can often be the most important factor of all. We’re going to see how that works out for him later this year.

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