[lit-ideas] Obama
- From: JimKandJulieB@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2006 19:10:18 EDT
I'd really like to see him in the contention...
Julie Krueger
<<Barack Obama should run for president.
He should run first for the good of his party. It would demoralize the
Democrats to go through a long primary season with the most exciting figure in
the
party looming off in the distance like some unapproachable dream. The next
Democratic nominee should either be Barack Obama or should have the stature
that would come from defeating Barack Obama.
Second, he should run because of his age. Obamaâs inexperience is his most
obvious shortcoming. Over the next four years, the world could face a genocidal
civil war in Iraq, a wave of nuclear proliferation, more Islamic extremism
and a demagoguesâ revolt against globalization. Do we really want a
forty-something in the White House?
And yet in his new book, âThe Audacity of Hope,â Obama makes a strong
counterargument. He notes that itâs time to move beyond the political style
of the
baby boom generation. This is a style, he said in an interview late Tuesday,
that is highly moralistic and personal, dividing people between who is good
and who is bad.
Obama himself has a mentality formed by globalization, not the S.D.S. With
his multiethnic family and his globe-spanning childhood, there is a little
piece of everything in Obama. He is perpetually engaged in an internal
discussion
between different pieces of his hybrid self â Kenya with Harvard, Kansas
with the South Side of Chicago â and he takes that conversation outward into
the
world.
âPolitics, like science, depends on our ability to persuade each other of
common aims based on a common reality,â he writes in his book. He distrusts
righteous anger and zeal. He does not demonize his opponents and tells
audiences
that he does not think George Bush is a bad man.
He has a compulsive tendency to see both sides of any issue. Joe Klein of
Time counted 50 instances of extremely judicious on-the-one-hand-on
the-other-hand formulations in the book. He seems like the guy who spends his
first 15
minutes at a restaurant debating the relative merits of fish versus meat.
And yet this style is surely the antidote to the politics of the past several
years. It is surely true that a president who brings a deliberative style to
the White House will multiply his knowledge, not divide it.
During our talk, I reminded Obama that at some level politics is about power,
not conversation. He pointed out that heâd risen from nothing to national
prominence in a few years so he knew something about acquiring power, but he
kept returning to his mode, which is conversation, deliberation and
reconciliation.
The third reason Obama should run for president is his worldview. At least in
the way he conceptualizes the world, he is not an orthodox liberal. In the
book, he harks back to a Hamiltonian tradition that calls not for big
government, but for limited yet energetic government to enhance social
mobility. The
contemporary guru he cites most is Warren Buffett.
He has interesting things to say about the way culture and economics
intertwine to create urban poverty. He, conceptually, welcomes free trade and
thinks
the U.S. may have no choice but to improvise and slog it out in Iraq.
The chief problem in his book is that after launching off on some interesting
description of a problem, he will settle back, when it comes time to make a
policy suggestion, into a familiar and small-bore Democratic proposal. Iâd
give him an A for conception but a B-minus for policy creativity.
Obama, who is nothing if not honest about himself, is aware of the problem,
and has various explanations for it. And what matters at this point is not his
platform, but the play of his mind. He is one of those progressives, like
Gordon Brown in Britain, who is thinking about the challenges of globalization
outside the normal clichÃs.
Coming from my own perspective, I should note that I disagree with many of
Obamaâs notions and could well end up agreeing more with one of his
opponents.
But anyone whoâs observed him closely can see that Obama is a new kind of
politician. As Klein once observed, heâs that rarest of creatures: a
megahyped
phenomenon that lives up to the hype.
It may not be personally convenient for him, but the times will never again
so completely require the gifts that he possesses. Whether youâre liberal or
conservative, you should hope Barack Obama runs for president. >>
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