Slipping Away?

CHICAGO, Oct. 9 -- After watching Barack Obama hit his stride at a boisterous Indiana rally Wednesday, I fired up the old laptop and came to a realization.

There is a growing acceptance among conservatives that Obama will probably be the next president of the United States.

You know how it goes after a big debate: Each side praises their guy and picks apart the other candidate. But if there's anyone seriously arguing that John McCain won the second debate in Nashville, I missed it.

Some pundits say McCain did well. Others challenged some of Obama's assertions. But many on the right were candid enough to say that Obama had won the evening. The most pointed grumbling, in fact, was directed at Tom Brokaw.

"I've never seen anyone who thought they won the baseball game walk off the field complaining about the last call by the umpire," Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs told me.

I saw it, too, in the somewhat deflated attitude of the McCain spinners at Belmont University. Gone were the usual overblown declarations of victory. "We remain in a very close race," Steve Schmidt said. "We have a tougher hill to climb than our opponent." In this political climate, he said, "we understand the difficulty of having an R next to your name."

It's more than that the battleground-state polls have broken in Obama's direction. It's that the economy seems to be crumbling, and everyone knows that doesn't favor the Republican nominee after eight years of Bush. The Palin boomlet has faded. The Ayers attacks don't seem to be getting much traction. And there is exactly one more debate for McCain to try to move a mass audience.

I'm not one for premature declarations. A month is a lifetime in politics. Wariness of Obama hasn't disappeared overnight. But in reading the mood of the pols and the pundits, my sense is that they believe Obama is close to clinching this thing.

The Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes says Obama is now seen as a plausible commander-in-chief:

"John McCain had a very strong debate. It's too bad for him that it came on a night when Barack Obama was nearly flawless.

"The debate began with questions on the economy and for thirty minutes Obama answered those questions with the kind of substance that I suspect anxious voters wanted to hear and with exactly the right tone -- empathic, aggravated, and determined. Most important, he spoke to voters in their own language.

"Obama's test in the first debate was to present himself as a plausible president, as a guy who didn't seem out of place on stage at a presidential debate and wouldn't seem out of place delivering a State of the Union address. Much as I'd disagree with the policies in such a speech, it was clear that he passed that test. Tuesday night, his job was to persuade voters -- particularly independents -- not only that he could be president but that he should be president. I suspect polling in the next couple of days will provide evidence that he passed that test, too."