Why Obama Can't Lose
Regardless of the outcome, he's forced the issues on the table
Ground Game
This time next week, we’ll be reading one of two storylines about the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination. Either: how it all went wrong for Barack Obama. Or: how Barack Obama upset the party establishment against the odds and became a contender. Intriguingly – and this is where our attention should be for the next few days – the two storylines are not as different as they might at first appear.
Political reporters love to pinpoint the exact moment when the tide turns from one direction to another. We’ve had an abundance of those already: Obama crossing the racial divide in Iowa; Hillary, moist-eyed and revealing she was human after all, grabbing just enough of the limelight ahead of the New Hampshire primary to bring her campaign back from the dead; Bill Clinton screwing it all up for his wife in South Carolina by intimating that the Palmetto State was just a consolation prize for African American also-rans.
Depending how things go on Super Tuesday, here’s a couple more turning points the media pundits might focus on. First, the moment it all started to go wrong for Obama. For my money, this came during the Nevada candidates’ debate on January 15, when the three leading Democrats were asked to name their greatest personal weakness. Only Obama answered this one honestly – he said he was bad at personal organization. He then proceeded to sound both surprised and hurt over the following days as his admission was used against him by his rivals.
Obama no doubt thought an honest answer would endear him to a voting public tired of the usual Washington talking points. He may have been right about that, but his answer, and his subsequent reactions, suggested both a lack of toughness and also a naiveté about the brutality of political campaigning.
In a highly fluid contest, that might have been enough to put Hillary over the top in Nevada and shore up her leads in the big Super Tuesday states, including California. Voters wavering between the two candidates might have reasonably concluded that Obama didn’t have the cojones to stand up to the Republican attack machine, while Hillary, with her 15-year experience of combating that “vast right-wing conspiracy,” knew exactly what she was getting into.
“Obama’s a good man, but I’m worried he’d be eaten alive by the Republicans, especially on national security,” Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa told me while stumping for Clinton in Nevada. It’s not an unreasonable fear.
Nor was it unreasonable to listen to Obama’s stump speech and worry that, for all the soaring rhetoric, there just wasn’t enough “there” there. “It can only happen if you believe,” Obama told one crowd in Las Vegas (and, no doubt, many more). “Do you believe?” he asked. The crowd roared back: “Yes, we believe!” This was the language of religious revival, not of hard-nosed politics. Listening to it, Bill Clinton’s “fairy-tale” jibe started to make a little more sense.
So much for what went wrong. How about the moment it all started coming right? Again, I’d point to a candidates’ debate, this time the one in South Carolina last week when Obama successfully shone a spotlight on Bill Clinton’s more nefarious campaign tactics and complained: “I can’t tell who I’m running against sometimes.”
From that moment, the argument about the political will to fight began to be turned on its head. Suddenly, the Clinton campaign started to look a whole lot less attractive, not to say distasteful – particularly about race. That, in turn, evoked unpleasant memories of the constant, furious partisan warfare that divided Washington in the 1990s – did the Democrats, or indeed the country, really want to go back to that? Or did they want a new voice striking a more conciliatory and positive note?
Obama also undermined Hillary’s most powerful claim to the voters’ imaginations – the prospect of the first woman president, championing the strength and independence of women everywhere – by questioning whether she was
really doing it all herself or whether she was leaning to a disturbing degree on the talent and experience of her husband.
How is all this going to play out next Tuesday? You’d have to be a fool to make firm predictions, given the see-saw nature of the race. Obama supporters have to appreciate – many of them do – they have a huge mountain to climb given the wide opinion poll leads Clinton enjoys in almost every significant Super Tuesday race. Equally, though, Clinton supporters have to acknowledge they can take very little for granted.
So much for the horse race. What does all this say about the voters? Clearly, they want a candidate with the stomach to fight and win – suggesting Hillary. But they don’t want a candidate so dirty as to tarnish their deeper aspirations – not so much Hillary after all. They, like the candidates, have made it abundantly clear they want change – which suggests Obama. But they also want a grown-up at the controls, so the long nightmare of the Bush presidency can be quickly forgotten – Obama hasn’t managed to seal that deal.
In other words, the voters are plain confused. Some of this confusion is genuine indecision
between two leading candidates who each have qualities to attract them. Some of the confusion, though, has to do with the dysfunctions of the American political system and the voters’ alienation from it. We all like to pretend presidential politics has at least the possibility of being high-minded, when it almost never is – hence the wavering between Obama the idealist and Clinton the realist (who nevertheless pretends to be as honest as the day is long).
We are also inordinately fond of going on surface impressions, without necessarily digging for the deeper truth. President Bush predicated much of his political success, while it lasted, on the notion that he was a better fighter against terrorism than any Democrat. It was bullshit then, and it is manifestly bullshit now. In this campaign, we are told Clinton is the more trusted candidate on economic issues. How come, though?
Ruth Marcus of The Washington Post did
an interesting thing last week by comparing the economic stimulus proposals of all the presidential candidates. The Republicans fared appallingly, mainly because they have talked almost exclusively about tax cuts, which have little or no immediate stimulative impact. Clinton received a C-plus grade for some distinctly muddled thinking on mortgage rates and a reticence about tax rebates to lower-income households. Obama, meanwhile, came in top of the class with an A-minus.
Did anyone notice or care? Not really.
Clinton scored the most political points because she came out with the first draft of her stimulus package before anyone else, and because people remember the boom years of the Bill Clinton presidency. The shoddiness of her proposals was secondary.
American voters are awfully slow to pick up on such things witness how long it took them to call the Bush administration’s bluff – and it
doesn’t help that the primary timetable is so telescoped into a few short weeks. Often, a problem becomes apparent after the voting is long over.
The key dilemma for Democratic voters is this: they are divided between what they’d like to see happen to American politics, and what they believe is actually achievable. Barack Obama is embarking on an ambitious and necessary thing – a challenge to both the intellectually bankrupt, over-pampered, unrepresentative
Democratic Party leadership, and to the Manichean logic of the two-party system itself. He may not win the nomination, or the presidency. He may not – given the weaknesses he has demonstrated on the campaign trail – necessarily be the best guy to carry the movement forward. But, win or lose, he’s already done enough to put the issues unavoidably on the table. That’s the real storyline, over the long term, to take away from this campaign.
2008-01-31
Published: 01/30/2008
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