Madam, - Senator Barack Obama must be the best candidate for the Democrats to nominate for this year's presidential election. Why? Because he scares Charles Krauthammer so much. Mr Krauthammer has devoted three of his past four columns largely to attacking Senator Obama. That means his chances of victory are high in Mr Krauthammer's estimation.
If Mr Obama is nominated, we can expect a series of Krauthammer columns on Tony Rezko, Rev Jonathan Wright and Michael Ayers. Who are this hitherto obscure trio? Mr Rezko is a Chicago developer on trial for shady dealings, who contributed to Obama's early campaigns; Rev Wright was Obama's pastor, and author of some fiery sermons critical of US foreign policy; William Ayers is an unrepentant former member of a forgotten 1960s urban guerilla organisation whose path crossed with Obama's during the 1990s in Chicago.
It is all very thin, really; not nearly as juicy as George W Bush's relationship with Kenneth Lay, the man at the centre of the notorious Enron scandal, or Bill and Hillary Clinton entertaining unrepentant Irish terrorists in the White House; or John McCain's enthusiastic acceptance of support from the Rev John Hagee, a nutty Texas preacher who wants a general Middle Eastern war to hasten Armageddon and the second coming of Christ.
Mr Krauthammer is annoyed because the Republican attack machine, which was prepared for Hillary Clinton, now has to be recalibrated to attack someone new, a vigorous young candidate to whom the elderly John McCain may be particularly vulnerable.
Similarly, Krauthammer himself is a bit off his game. Attacking Senator Clinton would have been easy - just a matter of recycling old columns about Bill and Monica, Whitewater, and various minor scandals. Worse still, some of the old generic slurs used against Democratic candidates do not apply this time. Somehow the picture of a Harvard-educated, liberal, Chardonnay-swilling elitist does not fit the black son of a single mother as easily as it fitted Al Gore or John Kerry.
Still, he has to think of something. Working up a lather about lapel pins, turbulent pastors and 1960s radicals is easier than discussing what John McCain is going to do about a trillion-dollar war that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives. - Yours, etc,
TOBY JOYCE, Balreask Manor, Navan, Co Meath.