This is painfully embarrassing:

Obama Promises a Forceful Stand Against Clinton

I really like Obama, but it’s pretty clear that he has been—will be—eating Hillary’s dust. And, much as it I hate to say it, deservedly so.

George Packer recently came to much the same conclusion, via another route (by reading Arthur Schlesinger’s recently published journals):

Two months ago, I wrote that Obama, with his veneer of idealism and his pragmatic core, reminded me a bit of J.F.K. That might have been wrong. Since then, it’s become clear that Obama is not “a devious and, if necessary, ruthless man,” as Schlesinger called Kennedy. Democrats drawn to Obama’s camp project onto him the sense of politics as a higher calling that Stevenson pioneered in the early nineteen-fifties (whether there’s much substance to it in Obama isn’t completely clear). In the American liberal tradition, this means almost certain defeat. Clinton, on the other hand, appeals to those liberals who want to sleep with power and its compromises and have made their peace with it.

The exercise of power is an art. The powerful don’t announce their intentions. They act, and attack, without warning. That unpredictability is one source of their power.