It has been a mixed week for Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate.
By R. EMMETT TYRRELL Jr. | August 21, 2008

....a Reuters/Zogby poll announced that the junior senator's 7-point lead over John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate, has dissolved into a 5-point deficit.

Senator McCain now leads him 46% to 41%. On the other hand, the press has discovered Senator Obama's long-lost half brother, George Hussein Onyango (also spelled Owango) living quietly in Kenya. Among the rustics who compose the Democratic base, this discovery can only help Senator Obama.

According to the Reuters/Zogby poll, the Democratic frontrunner has slipped with almost every category of Democratic voters: Catholics, Evangelicals, vegetarians, nudists, flagpole sitters — you name it. Yet the slippage has been greatest among the senator's core supporters, the liberals.

Among them he has dropped 12%. Part of the reason for this drop, Zogby speculates, is owing to the candidate's efforts to sidle toward the political mainstream. Zogby mentions Mr. Obama's switch from opposing all offshore oil drilling to accepting limited drilling.

Brother George will assuage the concerns of many of these liberals. According to the Italian edition of Vanity Fair, George lives in a hut in bucolic Hurma, Kenya, a few miles outside Nairobi. His residence is the epitome of "green," using no electricity, cooled solely by gentle breezes, and with no plumbing to pollute nearby waters, if there are nearby waters.

George leaves almost no carbon footprint. He does not drive an automobile. In fact, he lives a very spartan existence, spending only "a dollar a month," as he apprised VF in an exclusive interview; though other sources report an expenditure of a dollar a day. At any rate, his consumption of the world's resources is minimal............