When a somewhat racy music video of a woman with the hots for a presidential candidate causes the biggest stir in about two months, as in the case of Barack Obama recently, it’s a sign that a campaign has hit a plateau.

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Polls over the last month have consistently shown Senator Obama a strong second, but still considerably behind frontrunner Hillary Rodham Clinton. The Illinois Democrat performed fine in both debates so far, but nothing he said or did those evenings changed the dynamics of the race. Jerome Armstrong, the former Dean campaign staffer who is one of the most influential voices among liberal bloggers, concluded, “Obama’s running a well-funded, traditional presidential campaign that’s safely pointed toward finishing a strong second based on his personal appeal. I can see Obama getting a lot of points in the game, but never the lead.”

So how does Obama get out of his current nice-but-not-enough blahs? How does he overtake Hillary?

The Washington Post conducted a usefully detailed poll on how Democratic-primary voters feel about their three leading candidates, Clinton, Obama, and John Edwards. They found voters felt that Hillary was the strongest leader, the most experienced, the most trusted to handle a crisis, and the one with the best chance of winning.

So what’s left? Well, Obama ranked just behind Hillary on “understands the problems of people like you,” was ranked the “most inspiring,” and led solidly on “most honest and trustworthy.” Those areas represent Hillary Clinton’s soft underbelly, and that is where Obama is going to have to heighten the contrast.

Obama has to do this while not appearing to go negative. And it’s not clear that he can count on any other Democratic candidate to do any real damage to the frontrunner. Edwards has hit Clinton pretty consistently since he entered the race, with limited results. Some of the other candidates, like Bill Richardson, actually defend Hillary (a.k.a auditioning for veep). The ones who truly go after her, like Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel, are too far out on the fringe to make an effective attack.

And the no-negative-campaigning rule in the Democratic primaries is pretty serious: When Dick Gephardt went after Howard Dean before the Iowa primaries, both candidates saw their numbers plummet, an act that campaign wags called “a murder-suicide.”

“Promises made, promises kept”
Democratic-primary voters pretty much like what Hillary is saying, but they’re nervous about how much she’ll compromise once in office. “Triangulation,” the strategy of compromise embraced by her husband during her presidency, is a dirty word in liberal circles.

Obama’s campaign has done a nice job of telling his unusual and inspiring life story; now they need to showcase him as an effective political leader. Ideally, they would point to the centerpiece of his state legislative campaign in 1996, and how he enacted that key piece of legislation, and similar cases in 1998 and 2002. Finally, they need to show that since he’s gotten to the Senate, he played “a key role” in passing the expansion of Nunn-Lugar to cover landmines and missiles and the Coburn-Obama Transparency Act, which disclosed and organized all organizations receiving federal funds… The over-arching message for this front in the fight against Hillary has to be, “He says what he means and he means what he says.” The contrast with Hillary will be unspoken but clear.

“The humility to admit when wrong, the conscience to make amends”
It’s a bit odd that the biggest gripe the antiwar crowd has with Hillary isn’t so much her view of what to do in Iraq now, so much as her steadfast refusal to apologize for her war vote. But they’ve picked their priority. Obama has ridden his antiwar stance from 2002 about as far as it can take him. Now he needs to take Hillary’s refusal to apologize — interpreted by the base as obstinacy and intractability, and compare her traits to what they hate about Bush.