Barack Obama: Leap of Faith
Wall Street Journal
August 28, 2008; Page A13
"Every four years the Democrats send us another Governor we have to get to know."
So said The Wall Street Journal editorial page in 1992 as the electorate began its discovery of Arkansas's then-obscure governor, Bill Clinton. In 1988 it was Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, and before that Georgia's Jimmy Carter. "The real question," the Journal's editorialist wondered, "is why the party that dominates Congress has to keep putting up unknowns to contest the world's most powerful political office." Once again, the author mused, the system must "come to grips at the presidential level with more Democratic mystery."
Now comes the most mysterious Democratic presidential candidate in the memory of any living voter -- Barack Obama. After a 19-month run for the presidency, we still don't know him.Jimmy Carter, the previous holder of the most mysterious candidate title, served four years as a reform governor in Georgia. Bill Clinton, though little known beyond Arkansas, was a governor for 12 years.
The U.S. presidency is a political office, and nearly all nominees for it had a record in politics to offer a basis for shaping a view of how they might conduct the nation's highest office.
By this most traditional of measures, the Obama candidacy is a leap of faith.
A New York Times article on his years at Harvard Law, where he was editor of the law review, said, "In dozens of interviews, his friends said they could not remember his specific views from that era, beyond a general emphasis on diversity and social and economic justice." A similar piece on his years teaching at the University of Chicago Law School said he notably did not participate in its intellectual debates.
Barack Obama raises the prospect of a candidate for the first time being elected into the presidency almost wholly on the basis of a compelling persona. It is no surprise this could happen in an age tugged by the siren song of celebrity.
The 2008 election is almost certainly going to be decided by white, lower-middle-class voters -- the people who voted for Hillary Clinton this year and before that for Ronald Reagan. If these voters don't swing behind the Obama candidacy in Ohio, Michigan, Florida and Missouri, he will lose.
Yet amid a universally described lack of clarity about Sen. Obama's experience and core political beliefs, it is now being said that if the people in blue-collar counties don't vote for him, they, and their nation, remain racist.
This is false. If they don't vote for Barack Obama, it won't be over his personal roots, but because they're confused about the roots of his politics.
The assertion that workaday white people in Ohio's Mahoning Valley, Altoona, Pa., or Macomb County, Mich., won't vote for a black man reveals more about the race-based obsessions of the intellectual elites making these claims than the reality of this campaign.
Bear in mind that these voters didn't become an explicit concern of the Obama campaign until after Super Tuesday. Before the primaries arrived in Ohio and Pennsylvania, Sen. Obama's biggest wins were Iowa, South Carolina, Minnesota, Kansas, home-state Illinois, Georgia, Delaware, Connecticut, Colorado, Virginia, Maryland and Wisconsin. Amid the Obama jubilation, Hillary was winning California, New Jersey, Massachusetts, New York.
Sen. Obama accumulated his victorious lead early with a liberal coalition willing to vote for him mainly for reasons of faith – upper-middle-class whites, black voters and young idealists -- all attempting to complete the civil-rights promise, answer the post-partisan appeal, or vote against the war and George Bush.
Hillary's wins in the big states above were portents. His coalition's limitations hit the wall in Ohio. Here Sen. Clinton discovered her Rosie-the-Riveter persona, and it worked. I watched her sell bread-and-butter policy before blue-collar crowds in Youngstown, Akron and Cleveland. She was tremendously good at it. He just wasn't. The Sunday before the Ohio vote, Sen. Obama abandoned Ohio. The way Hillary won in these crucial November swing states may have fatally damaged his candidacy.
Does a candidate for the U.S. presidency have to be able to connect somehow with white working-class voters who didn't attend college to win? The answer, 40 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, is no longer about race. It's about the most fundamental question a plain-thinking voter asks: Does this guy get me?
Sen. Obama's biography is as compelling as his supporters claim. His problem is that there is nothing in it to suggest he has spent any significant time thinking about these people other than as a political abstraction. It's made more difficult by the fact that it is so hard for them to get a sure grip on him. When a politician leaves no political trail, some voters get lost. For Sen. Obama, after this long campaign, too many still look lost.
Write to henninger@wsj.com
No comments:
Post a Comment