David Gergen can always be trusted to spout the conventional Beltway wisdom, and if that CW is right, Obama is in trouble. He didn’t win over any new converts during his talk with “Pastor Rick,” says Gergen. Also, McCain’s campaign is picking up [e.a.]:

McCain is now on a sustained roll in his campaign. Since the time he shook up his organization a few weeks ago, he has been much more focused and has started to get through to voters. Democrats — and the press — didn’t like the quality of those ads, but they seem to have worked politically. His stand on drilling and on Russia have also strengthened his aura of command. And now Saddleback.

That’s quite a run and it is reflected in the polls: not only have the national numbers tightened up but McCain has actually moved ahead (slightly) in three key battleground states: Ohio, Virginia and Colorado. …

In short, the tide is moving for the first time in the Republican direction. And the realization is setting in that McCain might just win.

We are still many weeks away from the election and the overall landscape clearly favors the Democrats, but these latest developments put pressure on Obama and his party to pull themselves together or face a stunning upset.

Dick Morris is rather more pointed in his criticisms. He makes it clear that Obama himself is responsible for his decline:

Last week raised important questions about whether Barack Obama is strong enough to be president. On the domestic political front, he showed incredible weakness in dealing with the Clintons, while on foreign and defense questions, he betrayed a lack of strength and resolve in standing up to Russia’s invasion of Georgia. …

Obama gave away Tuesday night, Wednesday night and part of Thursday night to the Clintons. …

If Obama can’t stand up to the Clintons, after they have been defeated, how can he measure up to a resurgent Putin who has just achieved a military victory?

Good question!

When the Georgia invasion first began, Obama appealed for “restraint” on both sides. He treated the aggressive lion and the victimized lamb even-handedly. …

After two days, Obama corrected himself, spoke of Russian aggression and condemned it. But his initial willingness to see things from the other point of view and to buy the line that Georgia provoked the invasion by occupying a part of its own country betrayed a world view characterized by undue deference to aggressors.

That’s a canny observation, and I believe that the election will be decided by those (”swing” or “independent”) voters who make personal judgments about candidates on just such a basis rather than by party or by race or gender or age or income level.

Obama’s first reaction to almost every “crisis”—whether it’s geopolitical or in his own campaign—is the same: Everybody should just calm down.

That’s admirable in everyday life, where panic creates fog and thus blinds people from making the “right” decision. In a politician living in a 24/7 hysterical media world, it’s a catastrophe.

David Brooks, disappointed though he is in the negative tone of the McCain campaign of late, nevertheless indicates that it’s the McCainiacs who get this new media climate—which demands forceful rapid responsese—and who have accommodated to it, even at the price of McCain becoming less himself:

McCain and his advisers realized the only way they could get TV attention was by talking about the subject that interested reporters most: Barack Obama. …

McCain started with grand ideas about breaking the mold of modern politics. He and Obama would tour the country together doing joint town meetings. … Obama vetoed the town meeting idea.

McCain and his advisers have been compelled to adjust to the hostile environment around them. They have been compelled, at least in their telling, to abandon the campaign they had hoped to run. Now they are running a much more conventional race, the kind McCain himself used to ridicule.

The man who lampooned the Message of the Week is now relentlessly on message (as observers of his fine performance at Saddleback Church can attest). The man who hopes to inspire a new generation of Americans now attacks Obama daily. It is the only way he can get the networks to pay attention.

The networks, of course, care only about one thing: the sensational storytelling that will capture eyeballs and the audience’s fragmented attention.

Is this any way to elect a president? I dunno, but we’re stuck with it. And as I’ve been saying for a while, JFK understood this reality in 1959, at the dawn of the television age:

The camera operators and showbiz producers who put candidates through their paces may change their strategies and think up all kinds of new tricks and they make people go through all kinds of hoops, but the camera doesn’t lie—especially when it’s trained on you for two years.

To me, it looks like Obama peaked too early. But what do I know?

update: (via Jennifer Rubin) Dean Barnett amplifies on these themes [e.a.]:

Initially, Obama-philes like Andrew Sullivan referred to Obama’s exciting foreign adventure as an “objectively miraculous fortnight.” Now, even Sullivan sees that the trip revealed the worst aspects of Obama. Although Andrew doesn’t typically bother to list Obama’s greatest shortcomings, I will – a preening narcissism, a fondness for platitudes, a tendency to whine and a potentially fatal lack of substance.

It’s the latter failing that may truly doom Obama. People who have followed the campaign closely for a while have long since discovered that Obama is the ultimate one-trick pony. Provided with a teleprompter, he delivers a speech very nicely. But even that talent has grown stale as he has run out of material.

I would also add that, as many others have noted, Sullivan’s peddling of the “no cross in the dirt” smear against McCain —and then following it up with an insistence that journalists track down the truth about McCain’s story —is the surest sign that Obama’s campaign has gone south.

Are these questions that you want to know the answers to?:

why did you not mention this transcendent story in 1973? Why, in discussing three Christmases in captivity in Vietnam, was this story – far more powerful than any of the other anecdotes – omitted? How was it possible for the gun guard of May 1969 to be present at Christmas that year when McCain had been transferred to another camp? Is it possible that McCain’s memory has faded with time and that he has simply fused his own memories with other stories – as Clinton did with Bosnia sniper fire and as Kerry did in remembering another Christmas he could not have actually witnessed where he said he did?

I have no interest in getting answers to those questions.