Obama strategy problem?

http://hotair.com/archives/2008/07/11/newsweek-poll-obama-drops-like-a-rock/

'Last month, Newsweek’s poll surprised many by showing a huge gap between Barack Obama and John McCain, with the Democratic nominee-apparent enjoying a 15-point lead over the Republican. One month later, Obama has lost all of the momentum and has dropped into a virtual tie with McCain. The latest Newsweek poll shows Obama up 44-41, within the margin of error.'

Within a few nanoseconds of being confirmed as the nominee for the Democrat party, Obama started ditching his lefty positions for 'centrist' ones; for 'centrist', read Republican/mainstream. Crucially, he has backtracked on withdrawing immediately from Iraq. My reading of the drop in support for him is that he has lost his USP, his Unique Selling Proposition. When he had the Iraq withdrawal commitment, he had something no other candidate had. Now its gone, he's just another ambitious man who has triangulated. A significant minority of Americans have a rock-hard prejudice against the US intervention in Iraq; for them, Obama was the only game in town. Now he has given up that position, not only are that minority deeply disappointed in him, they are now free to examine his other positions from a vaguely dispassionate viewpoint, and there is at least a fighting chance that they will find his other positions too far left for their tastes.

A significant portion of Americans who are anti-war are not 'peaceniks'. They don't want US intervention anywhere in the world for completely selfish and patriotic reasons: they don't want American soldiers being killed in what they see as extremely remote and hopelessly chaotic places; They don't want US taxpayers money spent on fixing other peoples messes; They don't want annoying foreign entanglements which are then presented by foreigners as America being a bully or a colonial power; They just don't want anything much to do with the rest of the world. In many of the more rural and traditional parts of the US, this is still a very potent philosophy. Obama was their guy. He came across as being against interventions in general, and willing to stop the Iraq one stone dead.

Now he has dropped his Iraq pullout stance, those people will drop him in large numbers- quite possibly enough to lose the general election. The anti-war left are numerically fewer than the anti-war patriots, and will probably stick with Obama because he is still much further to left than McCain, especially on socialised medicine. But a so-far immutable fact about US Presidential politics is that left-leaning candidates lose; America is fundamentally centre right in general terms. In a straight fight between centrist candidates, the more right-leaning one is almost a shoe-in.