Listening to Obama’s speech on race in this country a few days back again reinforced to me the fact that Obama is a highly skilled politician. First, because the guy can deliver a speech so brilliantly. And this one was truly brilliant.

At the same time, it left no doubt in my mind that this guy is just another politician, not the savior he’s being billed as by his loyal supporters. And I’m surprised that no one has yet called out the fact that Obama was telling us things that his grandmother once said, likely thinking that it would never go past their intimate family circle.

Instead, Senator Obama aired his family’s dirty laundry out for the nation to see and history to record. The fact that his grandmother once said that she was afraid to walk past black men on the street — Jesse Jackson once said the same thing, btw — and that his grandmother has in the past uttered “racial epithets” that made him cringe. I’m assuming his grandmother must be dead and his mother still alive since he didn’t air her dirty laundry in the speech.

The fact is, once Pastor Wright’s statements emerged in public, Senator Obama tossed him aside.  When we began to hear Pastor Wright’s sermons saying that God should “damn” America and that HIV was manufactured by the government to kill Blacks, Senator Obama quickly move Pastor Wright off of his advisory council.

Then, when people began to seriously ask Senator Obama why he stayed in that church for 20 years, he tried to justify it by pulling his own grandmother into the fray and using her as a negative example.  “Well,” says the Senator in so many words, “my white grandmother said racist thing too!”  Of course, what he forgets to mention — but that which we all know anyway — is that you can pick your pastors and your church, but you cannot pick your family members.

You can, however, publicly humiliate them by pointing out their racist views to the entire country I guess.

If that’s not a skilled and typical politician for you, then I don’t know what is.

One has to wonder what is going through the minds of Democrats across the country right now. If we were one of them, we’d probably be sitting right now, head-in-hand, wondering how things could have become such a mess.

Two big states — Michigan and Florida — have been disenfranchised in these Democratic primaries and some campaign donors are threatening to pull support if those votes are not restored, the superdelegate system has become almost a ground war of losses and gains between the Clinton and Obama Campaigns, and the daily attacks between the Obama and Clinton campaigns has undermined their credibility on a range of issues.

For Obama in particular, the candidate who has based his entire campaign on the theme of “rising above” typical Washington politics, the reality-check that many supporters are getting while watching him give as good as he gets from the Clinton Campaign has to make them wonder if he’s not really just another politician. While most seem to think that Obama’s drop in poll numbers has more to do with the recent controversy over statements by his Pastor, it may also be that Senator Obama has been forced out of the “visionary new leader” template he had fashioned for himself and more into the “politics-as-usual” mode that comes from being under increasing attack by the Clinton Campaign on the left and Republicans on the right.

That said, one can see exactly how skilled Senator Obama truly is for one so new to national politics. The Senator built a campaign which rocked the vaunted Clinton political machine back on its heels, and has given him a clear — but not decisive — edge in the Democratic primaries.

It’s hard not to admire such skill, and Republicans rightly fear him as the candidate who would be toughest to beat come November. Some might counter these assertions by saying that, rather than the dawning disaster Republicans see for Democrats in 2008, they have instead an embarrassment of riches.

Three months ago, we would have grudgingly agreed. But that was then, and this is now.

Rather than an embarrassment of riches, we see a stale-mated, deadlocked Democratic Party. And we see two apt politicians who have crafted formidable campaigns and spent the past two years laboring to become their party’s presidential nominee. Both campaigns believe that whoever does win the nomination will likely go on to win the election in a cake-walk, and neither wants to simply walk away after working so hard and coming so close to victory.

Meanwhile, Republicans have selected for themselves an excellent candidate — Senator McCain — who has in reality the experience that both Senators Clinton and Obama are trying hard to manufacture out of thin air. And while Senators Obama and Clinton expend millions of dollars to hurl mud at one another, Senator McCain is visiting world leaders, talking to the troops in Iraq, and preparing to give a major foreign policy speech in just a couple of weeks.

While Senator Obama attemps to justify his pastor’s declarations that, rather than blessing America, God should damn America, Senator McCain will soon be explaining why our troops in Iraq are on the verge of a major victory in the war on terror. While both Senators Obama and Clinton rail against NAFTA, blaming it for the loss of jobs in this country, Senator McCain will be proposing a major cut in the corporate tax rate, something that will virtually guarantee the return of many of those lost jobs, as well as the creation of many new ones.

This is why Republicans in general are beginning to emerge from their previous attitude of gloom even while Democrats take their place. Republicans have a conservative-to-moderate presidential candidate who is eager for the coming campaign, while Democrats have two of the most liberal candidates in Washington slugging it out with no clear path to victory.

Perhaps Senators Clinton and Obama should heed the advice of liberal anti-war activists and simply run away. Let that insurgent known as John McCain declare victory and run his campaign unopposed.

What do you think? Sounds like the right strategy to us.