Category: Obama

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Election 2008 Humor Obama Politics

Overrated Much?

[digg-reddit-me]The Daily News’ article starts off a little less breathless than the headline:

Now Oprah Winfrey’s saleswomanship will be put to an ultimate test: Can she influence the course of American politics by helping vault Barack Obama into the White House?

By the third paragraph though, the hype suddenly jumps into overdrive:

Her power is almost unprecedented. Her show, now in its third decade, has helped shape the national debate on a huge range of issues and, with a few well-placed words, changed the buying habits of millions and put once-obscure books on the best-seller list.

Michael Saul, The Daily News‘ writer concludes on this jarring note:

Yesterday, Obama downplayed the power of Winfrey’s endorsement. “Ultimately, I’m going to have to make the sale,” he said.

I am not sure anyone can be said to be downplaying an endorsement by mentioning that, in the end, the election comes down to the candidate him or herself.

The Oprah story is getting a lot of play – I saw it on the cover of Newday and The Daily News this morning, and a Google News search reveals over 300 stories written around the world about the television diva’s decision to campaign for Barack Obama. From my brief foray into these stories, they all ask the same question: “What effect will Oprah have on the raceNervous Bill and Hillary?” They all strive to come to a clean answer, and end up with, “I don’t know.” But that doesn’t seem to stop the headline writers who have variously written: in Time magazine, “Why Oprah Won’t Help Obama”; at MSNBC, “How will Oprah’s endorsement affect 2008?” (Answer: The author doesn’t know.); the Toronto Star asks a similar question: “Can Oprah boost Obama’s political dream?” and answers in the same manner. The National Review‘s Myrna Blyth teases her readership with the headline: “Obama-Oprah 2008”. The subhead reveals the tease for what it is however: another over-processed story: “Can Oprah sell her favorite candidate?” I personally liked the Washington Post‘s approach best. They coupled a boring article covering all the celebrities converging on Iowa and New Hampshire without much hype but with this picture of Bill and Hillary looking very nervous. In other news, the Post article also reveals that John Edwards is sending in BONNIE RAITT. If this was a war of celebrities (and what else is a campaign but that), you know you’re leading the pack when you have Bonnie Raitt, who was kind of big a dozen years ago, as your top celeb campaigner.

Yet another day in the Freak Show that is our political system.

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Domestic issues Election 2008 Obama Politics Post 9/11 Generation

The Disengagement with Power

All of these legacies have left the young feeling depressed, cynical and[digg-reddit-me] powerless. And yet our democracy needs them more than ever now. Young people are always in the vanguard of any movement to sustain or advance liberty. Students led the charge for freedom in Prague and Mexico City in 1968, in Chile in 1973, in Beijing and throughout Eastern Europe in 1989.

Naomi Wolf in the Washington Post on the disengagement with power of the Post 9/11 generation. I’ve posted about this before: excerpts from an interview with a former radical Weatherman, a meditation on the post 9/11 generation, and a similar, but much more extreme version of this disengagement and its effects in the islamist movement.

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Election 2008 History Obama Politics

Experience : Judgment :: Clinton : Obama (or Paul or Kucinich)

An issue that has been raised repeatedly in the Democratic primary is that of “experience”.[digg-reddit-me] Hillary Clinton is claiming she is the most experienced candidate and has repeatedly criticized her opponents – specifically Barack Obama – for not having enough experience. This was my initial reaction after I first heard Obama was running earlier this year as well. But as the campaign wore on, Obama won me over. I think similar arguments could be made for Paul, Kucinich, or others as well. If you trust their judgment, then their experience is less important.

There are three main points that were made to change my mind.

  1. History has shown that experience does not lead to better job performance in presidential politics.
  2. Experience can be a proxy for good judgment, but it isn’t always.
  3. No one is prepared to be president, and anyone who claims to be prepared is lying.

1. History has shown that experience does not lead to better job performance in presidential politics.

I published this earlier, but have adapted it a bit for this post.

Richard Nixon was one of the most experienced people to assume the presidency. JFK had less experience than almost anyone. Yet he beat Richard Nixon in the middle of the Cold War while the president was responsible for overseeing a possible nuclear war. JFK’s inexperience led to the Bay of Pigs disaster, but he learned valuable lessons from this, accepted responsibility for the failure, and managed the Cuban missile crisis expertly. Richard Nixon was experienced, one of the most experienced men to have assumed the presidency having served eight years as vice president in addition to his significant legislative experience – he knew how to work the levers of power; but his personality led him to be secretive and paranoid, to try to bully and intimidate those who disagreed with him, etc. JFK was able to remedy his inexperience while Nixon was not able to remedy his character flaws.

If you want to look to a more recent example of the price of experience, just look at Donald Rumsfeld – who was one of the single most experienced bureaucrats in Washington – having worked in the military-industrial complex for the past three decades. He had already been Secretary of Defense during Ford’s tenure, and was chief of staff to the president before that. Despite – and in a way, because of – his experience, his time as Secretary of Defense was an absolute disaster for the military. We could talk about Cheney too if you wanted.

When you think about it, some of our greatest presidents have had little or no national experience before they became president during some of the toughest times in our history – Abraham Lincoln, who had no national or managerial experience, Harry Truman, who was isolated by FDR and did not even know that the atom bomb was in development, and Bill Clinton, whose previous experience had been governing one of the less important states in the union. Yet each of them rose to the challenges they faced, overcame their lack of experience, and mastered the job.

2. Experience can be a proxy for good judgment, but it isn’t always.

Obama in an interview with the Washington Post:

“They want to project Senator Clinton as the seasoned, experienced hand. I don’t fault them for that. That’s the strategy they’re pursuing, and my response is that what the American people need and what the Oval Office needs right now is good judgment. Experience can be a proxy for good judgment, but it isn’t always.”

[Obama] then repeated what he said during a debate in Chicago last week: “All the people who were on that stage in Chicago talking about their experience and criticizing me for the lack of it were the same people who went along and displayed incredibly poor judgment in going along with a war that I think has been a disaster.” [my emphasis]

3. No one is prepared to be president, and anyone who claims to be prepared is lying.

Chris Dodd to voters in Iowa:

“Anybody who stands before you and says, ‘I’m ready to do the job on Day 1’ ought to be disqualified. This is unique, this job. [When] you can sit behind the desk in the Oval Office, you can be better prepared and I believe I am. But you can’t be totally prepared for this.” In an interview afterward, Dodd suggested the proper attitude for anyone who inherits the White House in 2009: “They ought to be nervous.”

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Election 2008 History Obama

The Historical Obama

David Greenberg over at Slate has a piece about Barack Obama as Adlai Stevenson. (That is a bit of an unfair summary of Greenberg’s point – but he places Obama in the same political camp as the Mugwumps and Adlai.) Just a few weeks ago, Shaun Mullen, proprietor of the Kiko’s House blog “Is Barack Obama the New Gene McCarthy?” and answers, on the whole, yes. Some time before that Ted Sorenson, among others, began to compare Obama to JFK.

There’s always a bit of this going around – with Hillary and Giuliani both being compared to Nixon; Fred Thompson to Reagan; and Mitt Romney to JFK. But it is my sense that pundits are having a harder time placing Obama than any other candidate in the race. The comparisons to Nixon are based on the shared paranoia mainly; those of Fred Thompson have to do with his TV style; Mitt Romney because of the religious issue. The Obama analogies are different. Rather than attempting to make a historical comparison on a single point, they attempt to place his entire political presence.

I think the reason is that it is clear to most pundits where Hillary comes from – what tradition she is part of; the same is true of every other candidate. Obama represents a break. He represents a point of view that does not come out of nowhere, but is new to the political scene. He represents a new synthesis.

This is why everyone is struggling to explain him away with interesting (and insightful) historical analogies. And this is also why everyone so far has failed.

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Foreign Policy Obama Politics

Tom Friedman, Car Salesman

I like Tom Friedman. Reading his column for the past seven or so years, I have come to believe that he’s a good guy and his column regularly provides genuine insight in a simplified format. Several years ago though, The New Republic perfectly spotted his weakness in a throwaway comment in a larger article* calling Friedman a salesman instead of analyst. It is true that his columns, while providing insights, are weak on analysis. Friedman’s strength is that he will start with a truly interesting concept that reveals something about the situation he is commenting on – but his weakness is that his analysis of that concept is poor, and often diluted by the kind of “pox-on-both-of-their-houses” journalism that in attempting to be objective, ends up creating a false middle ground.

This is precisely the problem with Friedman’s latest column which suggests that Barack Obama should keep Dick Cheney as Vice President. A weird concept which Friedman explains thus:

When negotiating with murderous regimes like Iran’s or Syria’s, you want Tony Soprano by your side, not Big Bird. Mr. Obama’s gift for outreach would be so much more effective with a Dick Cheney standing over his right shoulder, quietly pounding a baseball bat into his palm.

Friedman explains that a President Obama could say something like this to the Iranian regime if Cheney was his Vice President:

“Look, I’m ready to cut a deal with you guys, but I have to tell you, back home, I’ve got Cheney on my back and he is truly craaaaazzzzy. You guys don’t know the half of it. He thinks waterboarding is what you do with your grandchildren at the pool on Sunday. I’m not sure how much longer I can restrain him. So maybe we should have a serious nuke talk, and, if it goes well, we’ll back off regime change.”

It’s not a mind-boggling insight – that there are ways to leverage an unhinged and powerful Vice President in diplomatic talks – but it is a solid insight, and one that is often overlooked- not least it seems by the current administration. Where I see Friedman go off the rails is in his attempt to portray Obama’s Iran policy. He cites Obama’s “inner Jimmy Carter” as part of the reason for making this statement: “Mr. Obama evinces little feel for generating the leverage you’d need to make such diplomacy work.” I can see someone plausibly making this argument – but not without trying to square it with Obama’s comments about being willing to launch attacks against high-value targets in Pakistan, with or without authorization from the Pakistani government. I consider this a distinctly un-Carteresque policy.

Friedman does not want to let the nuanced and balanced approach to foreign policy that Obama has explicitly and repeatedly put forth get in the way of Friedman’s bumper sticker approach to political commentary. Friedman sees a hawkish hawk and a Jimmy-Carter-ish dove when in fact Cheney is a hawk in the most extreme and unhinged sense and Obama is a pragmatist. The superficial case Friedman is trying to make – that we need both Cheneys and Obamas to make progress might be correct. But his subtext – that Cheney represents the hardline position and that Obama represents its opposite is incorrect. In Friedman’s own account, Cheney does not represent so much the hardline position as the specter of an irrational man with his hand on the trigger. Obama, as indicated by his many statements on foreign policy, does not represent the extension of Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy – but of precisely the balanced approach that Friedman seems to be advocating.

The problem is that either (1) Friedman does not know this; or (2) Friedman does not want to appear partisan. Either way, it has turned a potentially interesting column into a distorted bumper sticker view of foreign policy.

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Election 2008 Obama Politics

The Reappearance of Monica Lewinsky

Monica LewinskyAs some of my readers might have noticed, I watch the Drudge Report rather closely. He seems to be trying, again, like everyone else in the media, to be hyping the latest Democratic debate which will be airing tonight. His headline: “VEGAS BABY: WILL BO KO HRC?!” is a ridiculous lead-in to a rather tame New York Times article.

I have the feeling that the Hillary camp’s influence is all over that headline. Barack does not seem to want to deal a knockout blow – but rather with a few jabs to demonstrate that he is the better candidate and would be a better president. He does not want to take down Hillary, but instead, wants people to choose him. However, if everyone expects Senator Obama to take out Senator Clinton in this debate, or even to try – it will be very easy for him to lose the expectations battle and come out as the loser.

The one highlight of the New York Times article though is this gem from Ross K. Baker, a professor of political science at Rutgers University:

“One absolutely devastating accusation that could resonate is that she is gullible — she bought into two false story lines, one from her husband about Monica Lewinsky and one from President Bush about Iraq…”

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Election 2008 Obama Politics

Drudge Headline: “WOLF WARNED: NO GANGING UP ON HILLARY IN VEGAS!”

Drudge Report Headline on Blitzer

[digg-reddit-me]Hillary is trying the play hard ball and coming across looking like a thug. Who could have predicted that? The full text of the current Drudge headline reads: “WOLF WARNED: NO GANGING UP ON HILLARY IN VEGAS!” The sub headline with a more complete explanation explains:

“CNN's Wolf Blitzer has been warned not to focus Thursday's Dem debate on Hillary. 'This campaign is about issues, not on who we can bring down and destroy,' top Clinton insider explains. 'Blitzer should not go down to the levels of character attack and pull 'a Russert.'' Blitzer is set to moderate debate from Vegas, with questions also being posed by Suzanne Malveaux... Developing..."

Drudge isn’t sourcing this yet, but it passes the “sniff” test in my opinion. And if Hillary’s campaign had done this, I would expect Drudge to break the news. He’s generally very good at the “inside ball” stuff within the press community. All reporters love to leak to Drudge. See a larger version of the image here.

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Election 2008 Obama Politics

“The fierce urgency of now” and Barack Obama

[digg-reddit-me]The consensus seems to be that Obama made some hay at the Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Iowa. According to every account I have read, he had the best speech and the best audience response and his organization proved it could pack a large auditorium better than any opposing candidate, which would seem to bode well for the upcoming Iowa caucuses. The Des Moines Register’s David Yepsen concluded that “Obama’s superb speech could catapult his bid”.

Some background to illustrate the importance of the Jefferson-Jackson dinner:

The dinner is the Democratic party of Iowa’s main fundraiser which attracts a few thousand of the top activists in the state and most presidential candidates. It was where John Kerry launched his successful come-from-behind victory over Howard Dean after Kerry retooled his campaign. This year’s Jefferson-Jackson dinner was the largest ever, with over 9,000 people packed into the Veterans Memorial Auditorium. Obama had the largest contingent of supporters, followed by Hillary and then Edwards. Each candidate had their moments, but Obama was clearly the star of the show.

Coupled with a strong showing on Meet the Press this Sunday, a number of New Hampshire polls showing Hillary’s support dropping as much as 10 points with Obama gaining almost all of that, and a strong Iowa organization, the stars might aligning for this “skinny kid with a funny name”.

Here’s some excerpts from his speech with the complete video after the jump:

A little less than one year from today you will go into the voting booth and you will select the next President of the United States. Here’s the good news. The name G.W. Bush will not be on the ballot. The name of my cousin Dick Cheney will not be on the ballot. We’ve been trying to hide that for a long time. Everybody has a black sheep in the family. [laughter]

The era of Scooter Libby justice and Brownie incompetence and Karl Rove politics will finally be over. But the question you’re gonna have to ask yourself when you caucus in January and you vote in November is what’s next for America. We are at a defining moment in our history…The promise that so many generations fought for seems like it’s slipping away…we’ve lost faith that our leaders can or will do anything about it.

It is because of those failures that America is listening…we not only have a moment of great challenge, but a moment of great opportunity. We have a chance to bring the American people together, in a new majority…

That’s why telling the American people what we think they want to hear instead of telling the American people what they need to hear just won’t do. Triangulating and poll-driven positions because we’re worried about what Mitt or Rudy might say about us just won’t do…

When I am this party’s nominee, my opponent will not be able to say that I voted for the war in Iraq … And he will not be able to say that I waivered on something as fundamental as whether it is okay for America to torture because it is never okay. That’s why I’m in it!

… I will lead the world to combat the common threats of the 21st century … and I will send once more a message to those yearning faces beyond our shores that says you matter to us, your future is our future, and our moment is now. America, our moment is now.

Our moment is now!

I don’t want to spend the next year or the next four years refighting the same fights that we had in the 1990s. I don’t want to pit red America against blue America. I want to be the President of the United States of America.

And if those Republicans come at me with the same fear-mongering and swift-boating that they usually do, then I will take them head-on. Because I believe the American people are tired of fear, and tired of distractions…we can make this election not about fear, but about the future, and that will not be just a Democratic victory, that will be an American victory, a victory that America needs right now!

I am not in this race to fulfill some longheld ambitions or because I believe it’s somehow owed to me. I never expected to be here. I always knew this journey was improbable. I am running in this race because of of what Dr. King called “the fierce urgency of now.” Because I believe that there’s such a thing as being too late, and that hour is almost upon us.

Complete video after the jump.

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Election 2008 Foreign Policy Obama Politics

The Real Obama

There have been a few profiles in the past few days of Senator Obama, timed perhaps to coincide with the beginning of the sprint for the Democratic nomination.  I already posted some excerpts from Andrew Sullivan’s excellent piece and the candidate himself seems to have picked up on the meme himself.  The theme of Sullivan’s piece was that no other candidate had the promise or the potential of Obama and that Obama and Obama alone could truly respond to this unique moment in American history, both culturally within our country and as our representative abroad.  James Traub has a piece that is somewhat more critical in the New York Times Magazine this past weekend.  Traub reports that Obama is supported by most of the Democratic foreign policy elite, aside from a few of President Clinton’s top aides, who support Hillary.  However, among many voters, Traub sees the problem as this:

Democratic voters seem to be torn between the hope of reshaping a frightening world and the fear of being terribly vulnerable to that world.

Traub concludes:

Obama concedes that he has a problem. “We have not fully made our case yet,” he admits. “I think the American people know in their gut that we need significant change, and I think they’d like to believe what I’m saying is possible.” But they need, says this former law-school professor, “a permission structure.” They need to know that they’ll be safe with Barack Obama. Or unsafe with Hillary Clinton.

Two months before the presidential primaries begin, it still looks like a hard sell.

From the Weekly Standard, Dean Barnett reaches a similar conclusion while analyzing Barack Obama’s charisma and personal appeal.  He explains how he researched Obama’s past trying to find some dirt from his years at Harvard Law, but that oddly enough he could not find anyone who disliked Obama.  Barnett finds this extraordinary – for a top student at a top school who won every honor and excelled, graduating magna cum laude would not have aroused significant jealousies and other petty remembrances.

The results surprised me. Regardless of his classmates’ politics, they all said pretty much the same thing. They adored him. The only thing that varied was the intensity with which they adored him. Some spoke like they were eager to bear his children. And those were the guys. Others merely professed a profound fondness and respect for their former classmate…

The people that Obama so thoroughly charmed generally weren’t the charm-prone types. I say the following as a well known Republican partisan–the fact that his classmates so universally held him in the highest regard suggests that Barack Obama may truly be a special person.

Working for the Weekly Standard however, Barnett is forced to conclude:

There’s still time for the man that I’ve heard is the real Obama to emerge. If he does, he’ll be formidable. But time is growing short.

Both Barnett and Traub reach similar conclusions: they both believe that Obama has greater potential than any of the other Democratic candidates; that he is “special”, and extremely intelligent; and that he’s not quite ready.

You might recall I concluded the same thing after hearing him speak at Washington Square Park this September:

What he is missing is something that everyone around him can sense–his audiences, his aides, himself. Perhaps it is a certain resolve to take on the responsibility; perhaps it is a sense of certainty that he will be able to perform the job. What is missing is both obvious and amorphous.

He is missing just this thing. He is not yet ready. But come January, I believe and hope he will be.

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Election 2008 Foreign Policy Giuliani Obama Politics

Obama v. Giuliani

Giuliani decided to echo Hillary Clinton’s attacks on Barack Obama last Friday, saying that Obama’s decision to engage in aggressive diplomacy with Iran was “naive” and “irresponsible”. The Obama camp responded thus:

While Rudy Giuliani may embrace Hillary Clinton’s policy of not talking and saber rattling towards Iran, Barack Obama knows that policy is not working. It’s time for tough and direct diplomacy with Iran, not lectures from a Mayor who skipped out on the Iraq Study Group to give paid speeches, and who was naive and irresponsible enough to recommend someone with ties to convicted felons for Secretary of Homeland Security.

This is what I like to see, and the statement is on par with the Obama camp’s response to Hillary Clinton’s campaign when they started to attack Hillary defector David Geffen.

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