Barack Obama's most overlooked and perhaps best presidential qualification might be his ability to predict the future, read peoples' minds and quote them, word for word, before they even speak.

"We know what kind of campaign they're going to run.  They're going to try to make you afraid," Obama told supporters after a meeting with Democrat Governors in Chicago last Friday.  "They're going to try to make you afraid of me.  He's young and inexperienced and he's got a funny name.  And did I mention he's black?  He's got a feisty wife."

If the speaker of that yet-to-be-said quote turns out to be John McCain then this next Obama comment will prove his clairvoyance and channeling ability beyond a shadow of a doubt: 

"We know the strategy because they've already shown their cards.  Ultimately I think the American people recognize that old stuff hasn't moved us forward.  That old stuff just divides us." 

What I hear Obama saying is: "Why wait for your opponent to go negative and be forced to defend yourself when you can put the negative words in your opponent's mouth and force him to be defensive not only about what he didn't say but what he might say in the future?"  How's that for a novice New Age pre-quoter?

In reality, the only campaign card John McCain has shown thus far is one imprinted with the oft-repeated statement that he intends to concentrate purely on his own and his opponent's records, qualifications and ideas and that at no time does he intend to resort to personal attacks, negativism or mud slinging. 

"Every word will be twisted to make it about race," said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) a McCain friend and adviser. "When he and others confront Obama on issues such as national security and the economy it will have nothing to do with him being an African-American."

Obama is right about one thing.  McCain's message is definitely "old stuff".  It hearkens back to a time when there were no spin doctors, talking heads or sound bites; when age, slickness and physical appearance were non-issues.  He is dead wrong about it being a divisive message.

On the other hand, the so-called change candidate, during this extended lead-up to the real campaign, has had plenty of time to practice and perfect a change in the rhetorical style of going negative. 

That Obama has, despite standing for little more than a slogan, already eliminated a shoo-in opponent who, along with her husband's cronies, invented passive/aggressive mud slinging and the Politics of Victimhood speaks volumes about Obama's true identity.  He is a politician -- no more and no less -- and will play dirty politics whenever he needs to obfuscate the issues that would derail his campaign train.

Regardless of the cleverness of his rhetorical technique, those issues obviously do result from the candidate's youth and inexperience as well as his many questionable social, political and financial associations, his dangerously liberal voting record and his naive, undeveloped ideas about foreign and domestic policy.  As such, that should be more than enough to make people "afraid" of Barack Obama. 

Those issues, however, do not result from his "funny name", his skin color or his "feisty wife" and no one, except Obama in his own passive/aggressive pre-quoting speechlets, has ever said so. 

McCain's silence in this case is golden.  Allowing his opponent's concocted quotes to hang in the air like so much smoke at a phony séance while media pundits analyze and debate them will ultimately help to make his criticisms of Obama's scary qualifications and ideas that much more credible.

Unfortunately, the only thing that has changed about "that old stuff that just divides us" is the rhetorical style of its delivery.

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