Obama is a strong candidate because...

The biggest criticism of Senator Obama is his lack of experience. As an Illinois Senator with 4 years in the US Senate, he's young, and doesn't have much experience at the national level. It's a fair criticism, but see in the RGJ how he turns it around:

“I have a pretty good sense of my strengths and my weaknesses,” he said today during a meeting with the Reno Gazette-Journal editorial board.“I am very good at teasing out from people who are smarter than me what the issues are and how we resolve them,” he said. “I don’t think there is anybody in this race who can inspire the American people better than I can. And I don’t think there is anybody in this race who can bridge differences ... better than I can.“But I’m not an operating officer. Some in this debate around experience seem to think the job of the president is to go in and run some bureaucracy. Well, that’s not my job. My job is to set a vision of ‘here’s where the bureaucracy needs to go.’”