Obama needs to learn how to campaign.  He thinks he's a Republican running against Democrats, in a Democratic nominating process.  People sense that, and it's why he can't close the deal and prevent a brokered convention.  It hasn't helped Obama that he has shown himself to be what, as Adolph Reed describes in this month's issue of The Progressive, a "vacuous opportunist."

This is Obama's biggest problem, as Reed goes on to argue:

His political repertoire has always included the repugnant stratagem of using connection with black audiences in exactly the same way Bill Clinton did--i.e., getting props both for emoting with the black crowd and talking through them to affirm a victim-blaming "tough love" message that focuses on alleged behavioral pathologies in poor black communities. Because he's able to claim racial insider standing, he actually goes beyond Clinton and rehearses the scurrilous and ridiculous sort of narrative Bill Cosby has made infamous.

It may be instructive to look at the outfit where he did his "community organizing," the invocation of which makes so many lefties go weak in the knees. My understanding of the group, Developing Communities Project, at the time was that it was simply a church-based social service agency. What he pushed as his main political credential then, to an audience generally familiar with that organization, was his role in a youth-oriented voter registration drive.

The Obama campaign has even put out a misleading bio of Michelle Obama, representing her as having grown up in poverty on the South Side, when, in fact, her parents were city workers, and her father was a Daley machine precinct captain. This fabrication, along with those embroideries of the candidate's own biography, may be standard fare, the typical log cabin narrative. However, in Obama's case, the license taken not only underscores Obama's more complex relationship to insider politics in Daley's Chicago; it also underscores how much this campaign depends on selling an image rather than substance.

This phony little jerk is trying to sell himself to a crowd that demands something else entirely.  That's a losing strategy, one that has kept Democrats from winning back the White House for eight years.