So… four months ago Barack Obama looked like a juggernaut as he systematically dismantled Hillary Clinton’s supposedly unstoppable storm troopers. John McCain looked like an accidental nominee who simply outlasted his competition, each of whom seemed to have one insurmountable vulnerability which inevitably torpedoed them as they tried to separate themselves from the rest of the GOP pretenders.

At that time I truly believed that by August Obama would have a 25 point lead in the polls and Republicans would be tearing each others hearts out.

Instead we have a statistical dead heat in many of the most well-known political polls as the two parties head into their nomination.

What happened?

Well… I think two things happened, and they are, of course, interrelated.

First we saw that Hillary finally managed to score a hit on Obama, even though it was far too late for her to stop Obama’s march to Denver. But what that hit did manage to do is the same sort of thing that happened to Captain Cook in Hawaii. Much like Obama, Cook was revered as a god by the indigenous people of the islands. And Cook took advantage of that to set up a little kingdom of his own. But one day some angry Hawaiian managed to get a spear or knife past Cook’s guards and the resulting wound bled real, palpable human blood. And gods don’t bleed. Once the illusion of divinity had been punctured, the rest of the Hawaiians no longer thought that Cook was divine, and with his aura of invulnerability erased, they turned on him and beat him to death.

Now I don’t expect the American public to get violent with Obama, but politically I think that when Hillary’s final desperate attacks drew blood, a large part of Obama’s messiah myth was exposed and a large fraction of previously enamored Obama-ites looked up, rubbed their eyes and said “hey, this Obama guy is just like all the other politicians after all.” And that allowed McCain to exploit the same weaknesses Hillary exposed and to expand upon that with a clever campaign of ads designed to expose Obama’s true weaknesses.

But the other part of the answer to why Obama has lost all that momentum is really due to a flurry of serious mistakes by Obama and his top campaign advisers. Obama’s trip to Europe was not the public relations bonanza the Obama team expected. Instead it came across to most of middle America as unbelievable arrogance and self-admiration. His flip flops on a series of issues have been received as rank political poll pandering that typifies the opportunistic populist wanna-be. McCain and other Republican efforts to paint Obama as an inexperienced celebrity lightweight have been far more successful than I think even Obama realizes yet. The biggest weapon against arrogance and conceit has always been ridicule and humor, and Obama has made himself a juicy target for attacks that focus on his preening, self-important verbosity.

And that’s one of the main reasons that the Biden pick is such a horrible pick for Obama. It plays perfectly into the stereotype that McCain and the RNC have been painting for Obama. It gives the Republicans the opportunity to say “See, not only do WE see that Obama is a political babe-in-the-woods who needs his hand held by more savvy and experienced handlers, but Obama HIMSELF has admitted it with this pick of Biden to ‘balance out’ the ticket.” That’s the reason the McCain camp trotted out the Joe Biden quotes from the primary where Biden stands by his forceful accusation that Obama is not ready to lead.

So now you have Hillary Clinton telling the country that Obama is not ready to lead. Obama’s own actions have demonstrated a serious lack of political savvy, and now his own Vice President is on TV repeatedly telling the country how lame Obama is, while Obama’s face in the background takes on a pained, whiny expression that looks exactly like a man whose fragile ego has been punctured.

This “not ready to lead” theme and meme is potentially powerful enough to defeat Obama. Hopefully McCain can keep it front and center with fresh material for the next few months, while simultaneously targeting Obama’s insane Leftist policy proposals and exposing them for the socialist twaddle that they are.

If McCain manages to scratch out a win in November, the first person he should publicly thank for the win should be Hillary Rodham Clinton.