Some “top” Democratic Obama supporters are urging Hillary Clinton to drop out unless she wins decisively on Tuesday.

Karl Rove [!] tries to boost her morale [e.a.]:

[T]he former senior political adviser to President Bush and architect of his presidential election victories, said such calls from Democrats for Mrs. Clinton’s withdrawal were unwise and unbecoming.

“I think it’s a mistake for his campaign to be calling for her to drop out,” Mr. Rove said on Fox. That would be seen as “rubbing her nose” in the fact that she is trailing, he said. “It’s up to the delegates at the convention to decide who wins and loses,” he added.

Yes indeed it is. Besides, Obama has been on the receiving end of some bad press for the last few days, even as Hillary got a bit of a boost from her whining about unfair press coverage and took the opportunity to launch some well-aimed salvos. The Times continues:

And some political analysts said that Mrs. Clinton — who has clearly sharpened her attacks on Obama, even as he has been outspending her — appeared to have made some headway in recent days in raising doubts about his experience and readiness to be commander in chief.

Everybody made fun of her 3 a.m. fear-mongering video, but everyone talked about it. And then talked about it some more. Including Obama. And her message got through to those it was aimed at: Democrats who want someone strong to be commander in chief.

Lanny Davis, reading the recent Pew poll results, tells it like it is to Obama supporters: their guy is shockingly weak in this area in the general election.

The headline makes his point: “The Ringing Phone Reflects, Doesn’t Invent, Voter Concerns Already Seen in Polling Data.”

For example, according to the Pew data:

the first word volunteered when Democrats are asked to name an impression of Senator Obama to Pew is the word “inexperienced.”
Conversely, the first word associated with Senator Cliton is “experienced.” Twenty-five percent of all Democrats say that Senator Obama is “not tough enough in his approach to foreign policy issues.”

Davis goes into a lot of details, and concludes:

Thus the early pattern of exit polls remains true, despite press reports to the contrary: The FDR/blue collar/senior citizens historic base of the Democratic Party is less favorable to Senator Obama than to Senator Clinton.

Upshot: the support for Obama is a real phenomenon, all right. A lot of people are captivated by him and into him. He is a great speaker and a fascinating presence and mystery man.  But while the enthusiasm for his candidacy is real, there is also an active campaign and media narrative about the movement surrounding Obama. The hype has been massive.
It has given him an aura of overwhelming popularity that is not borne out by the latest polling data. And yet “top” Democrats are urging Hillary Clinton to step aside.

Interesting.

Does America face an existential threat? Andrew Sullivan introduces the question by quoting Daniel Larison’s Pshaw response to Jed Babbin:

Rhetoric that speaks of an “existential threat” is simply not credible, and anyone who deploys such an over-the-top argument will rapidly lose credibility with everyone outside an intense core of true believers.

But what Babbin actually said was much more nuanced—and is also at least partially true:

The enemy is a two-headed monster. First, it is an ideology: radical Islam. Islam is a religion, radical Islam is an ideology. And like Communism and Nazism before it, it must be defeated. The second head is comprised of the nations that sponsor terrorism.

This brings the inevitable conclusion: Regardless of what happens to Iraq’s nascent democracy, a war must be fought to defeat the terrorist ideology, and to compel the nations that sponsor terrorism against us and our allies to cease doing so. Unless and until that occurs, the war goes on.

Babbin makes it sound like a bloody kinetic war that will go on forever. That’s not very smart. Thus, Larisan is correct when he warns that Babbin’s argument—which stresses a true threat to the West from radical political Islam backed by indiscriminate bloodthirsty carnage—even if the argument is true, will discredit you with most people outside a tiny circle of “true believers.”

But that doesn’t mean that the people inside that tiny circle are wrong—or that the vast majority of people who profess to think about such things and instead parrot one another inside a vast echo chamber—i.e., the biens-pensants—are right. What it means is that Babbin isn’t very adept at making the argument.

There are many ways to fight the battle, and we will need every weapon we possess, but there’s no doubt that there is a challenge—and a threat—to America and the West to freedom and democracy from radical political Islam.

Whether radical political Islam backed by blood-curdling intimidation tactics, aka “terrorism,” constitutes an “existential” threat is a semantic argument and, as such, a distraction.

The reality is that the freedoms we take for granted here in the West are under persistent attack from political Islam, in ways large and small. The other reality is that there seems to be only a small fraction of people who care enough to keep talking about it in public.

Here’s a group that is serious about getting the message out. It includes the Danish newspaper editor Flemming Rose, who first published the Mohammed cartoons.

Yes, the Israelis—strong, mighty, and militarily powerful though they are—can be and are victims of Palestinian aggression.

The Times (London) describes one view of the situation:

While many Gazans resent the rocket fire – which they acknowledge ultimately causes them far more harm than Israel – most are too afraid to stand up to Hamas and its thousands of devoted gunmen. Those who criticize the rocket-launchers are quickly branded traitors, a dangerous epithet in a lawless area racked by nationalist violence.

Hamas for its part is playing a game of brinkmanship, baiting Israel with its rockets and counting on nationalist sentiment to make Gazans back them when Israel attacks with deadly force.

The people of Gaza are caught in between two sides. Isolated economically and diplomatically, Hamas’s leaders appear to be trying to emulate Hezbollah’s 2006 withstanding of an Israeli onslaught while still continuing to fire their rockets, which brought the Lebanese wide-ranging support on the Arab street.

The Israeli response to this aggression was fierce and deadly over the weekend, as reported by the BBC:

On Saturday, at least 60 Palestinians were killed in one of the bloodiest days of fighting between Israelis and Palestinians in years.

The death toll from Israeli air strikes included at least 25 civilians, including nine children and three women.

The other fatalities were Palestinian militants - the majority of them from Hamas, the Islamic movement which controls Gaza.

Laura Bialis, living under rocket fire from Gaza, describes how it feels.

Saturday, Noon:
Helicopters. I get online. I can’t help it. What does it say in the news. Thirty-three qassams from yesterday until now. Twenty-six people killed in Gaza, including some civilians. Several IDF soldiers injured.

I look at the press from the West and get very angry. Its mostly about their injuries. Another article about Palestinian protests about our attacks. This is ridiculous. If there were no rockets raining on us the IDF wouldn’t have anything to do there. I don’t like the way we are portrayed. We don’t want this war. They are dragging us in. What can we do? There are rockets raining on us daily. But in the media we look like the aggressors. It feels so unfair to be sitting here and reading that. My entire perspective has changed. I used to think that Israel needed to take care of how it looked to the western world — that we can’t look like monsters. Now I know it doesn’t matter. They will paint us however they want. I just can’t read the news anymore, it makes me too angry. We need to move forward with our lives, protect ourselves. The government has a responsibility to protect its people. The question is, what is the best way to do that?

Indeed: what is the best way to do that?

I don’t know. No one knows.

Like Mark Bittman, I’ve been trying to find a balance between being online and being, um, fully engaged in my everyday life, so I haven’t been scrutinizing the media. But out of long habit, I still read the dead-tree New York Times every day, and I am sensitive to its coverage on most issues.

I don’t feel much like blogging today, but I’d be falling down on the job if I didn’t make note of this as I notice it. Barack Obama suddenly appears to have a “Jewish problem,” if this article, which appeared on the front page yesterday (under the headline “Obama Walks a Difficult Path as He Courts Jewish Voters”), is any indication—and you know I think it is or I wouldn’t be talking about it.

Then there was this suggestion, in a different Times article yesterday, that Obama had been less than forthright about his efforts over the last month to court Jewish voters:

Lynn Sweet, the Washington bureau chief of The Chicago Sun-Times, voiced a more basic lament: that the candidate’s aides omitted seemingly newsworthy gatherings from his publicly released schedule. As an example, she cited the lack of previous notice about a meeting he had with about 100 Jewish leaders in a Cleveland suburb last Sunday.

“The main issue is not whether he comes back here and shmoozes,” Ms. Sweet said of Mr. Obama, her hand tracing the middle and rear of the cabin. “First, tell me what you’re doing. Then we can argue if I can have access.”

Asked about Ms. Sweet’s concerns, Mr. Axelrod said that a transcript and video of the meeting had been released to her and others. “Occasionally, people in politics have private meetings,” he said.

Mr Axelrod seems just a wee bit disingenuous, not to mention defensive. In fact, Obama has been speaking not only to American Jews but to the Israeli press. And so has his foreign policy adviser Samantha Power.

On February 11, the op-ed columnist Roger Cohen, in a piece supporting Obama, precisely laid out the threads of an alleged smear campaign against a candidate whose “Jewish credentials are under scrunity“:

The attacks, mainly anonymous e-mails, have woven together various threads — his middle name ”Hussein;” schooling in Muslim Indonesia; his Chicago pastor’s embrace of the anti-Semitic leader of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan; and his calls for dialogue with Iran — to portray Obama as the Muslim Manchurian candidate.

In retrospect, this looks to me like a list of Jewish-themed attacks that the Obama campaign expected that Obama would have to fight off. Indeed, the campaign is now forced to spend a lot of time on these issues.

I for one am not too concerned about whether Obama “feels Israel in his kishkes.” (I think Obama doesn’t have kishkes; he is pure reptile.) I’m not even going to spend too much time thinking about why Obama felt so comfortable, in his “private” meeting with some Jews in Cleveland, mouthing off against Likud (perhaps because this decidedly not-post-partisan “forward-leaning” language appeals to some of his young supporters, and because his Jewish crew is representative of Jews in the “progressive” community but not Jews in the wider—and more diverse, and older—”liberal” community … including people once known as liberal hawks. But what do I know?).

Instead, I am going to blame this problem squarely on the shoulders of Barack Obama, who, as I said at the time, made a series of errors in judgment in his answers about the Louis Farrakhan question during his debate last Tuesday.

Farrakhan is not merely a drive-by hater. His three-decade-long career is infused with a vicious, conspiratorial, poisonous Jew-hatred.

While Obama is having a bad few days, Soft-Focus Hillary is getting some good press.

Those are the undercurrents as of 1:00 p.m.

But we’re on Feiler Faster time. Anyone willing to predict anything about Tuesday’s upcoming primaries is a fool.