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February 18, 2008
| Obama's Coattails | Politics |
Last week's Obama event here in Madison was impressive. Thousands of people waited in single-digit temperatures for the doors to open, and when the doors did open, the Kohl Center's 17,000 seats filled quickly. Still more people watched in the overflow room on CCTV. The crowd was largely student-aged, but a cross-section of the community was there as well. I've never seen a more enthusiastic crowd at a political event.
Obama himself has an effortless sort of magic. No other American politician is as gifted. In person, he seems to radiate a relaxed, confident mastery and warmth. Other politicians importune. They want something from you, and badly. (One thinks of Hunter Thompson's lines that Hubert Humphrey "campaigned like a rat in heat," while Edmund Muskie sounded "like a farmer with terminal cancer trying to borrow money on next year's crop.") Obama, on the other hand, projects a kind of "here I am, I'm ready if you are" vibe. Not for nothing does he end his appearances with the Stevie Wonder song that goes, "Here I am, signed, sealed, delivered, I'm yours."
Having said all that, I continue to have my doubts about a man who could write, as Obama did in Foreign Affairs last summer:
To renew American leadership in the world, we must immediately begin working to revitalize our military. [...]We must use this moment both to rebuild our military and to prepare it for the missions of the future. We must retain the capacity to swiftly defeat any conventional threat to our country and our vital interests. But we must also become better prepared to put boots on the ground in order to take on foes that fight asymmetrical and highly adaptive campaigns on a global scale.
We should expand our ground forces by adding 65,000 soldiers to the army and 27,000 marines. [...]
I will not hesitate to use force, unilaterally if necessary, to protect the American people or our vital interests whenever we are attacked or imminently threatened.
We must also consider using military force in circumstances beyond self-defense in order to provide for the common security that underpins global stability — to support friends, participate in stability and reconstruction operations, or confront mass atrocities. But when we do use force in situations other than self-defense, we should make every effort to garner the clear support and participation of others — as President George H. W. Bush did when we led the effort to oust Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991. The consequences of forgetting that lesson in the context of the current conflict in Iraq have been grave.
Obama may be opposed to the Iraq War, but he's hardly anti-war. His candidacy is packaged as some kind of grass-roots insurgency, but he's got plenty of elite backing. Yes, his personal story is impressive, and yes, he says a lot of the right things, but it remains to be seen just how progressive a president he would be.
But one thing he said in his Madison speech really struck me. He said that to create real change a president needs to come into office with a "mandate for change."
That's when I saw why I should vote for Obama in tomorrow's Wisconsin primary. Hillary Clinton might be able to win — barely — in the general election, but Obama has the potential to win big. In last Tuesday's Virginia primary, for example, Obama beat Clinton almost two-to-one. Virginia is a red state, a state where Bush won easily in 2004. But last Tuesday, Obama got 623,141 votes; all Republican candidates combined got only 487,656.
And if Obama wins big in the general election, he brings a lot of Democrats in with him. Obama is not as progressive on the issues as we would like (neither, of course, is Clinton), but Obama with a solidly Democratic Congress — that could be a real watershed. Even, conceivably, like FDR in 1932. After all, FDR had been a relatively conservative governor, but when he swept into office with an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress that was well to his left, he adapted quickly.
A landslide like FDR's is unlikely. But Obama does have the possibility of coming into office with a real "mandate for change." Hillary Clinton does not. That's why I'm going to vote for Obama. One can hope that he'll live up to his rhetoric, but I'm not counting on it. The bottom line is this: Obama's coattails.
Don't get me wrong. I realize that today's Democrats are what Republicans used to be, back before Ronald Reagan and this country's hard right turn. Bill Clinton only seems liberal because people compare him to Reagan and the Bushes. So it's not that a Democratic majority is the answer. But it beats the alternative. And, who knows, maybe the energy mobilized by the Obama phenomenon will begin to break the DLC's hold on the Democratic Party, and the Democrats can finally stop trying to be Republican Lite.
Posted by Jonathan at February 18, 2008 10:57 PM
