Like most Americans, I was introduced to Barack Obama the night of July 27, 2004. His speech and his subsequent election to the U.S. Senate inspired many of us. There were plenty of people, myself included, who wondered when - not if - the newly-minted senator would make an historical run for president. It turned out to be sooner than anticipated, and I was fairly quick to jump on the bandwagon as a nominal supporter when he announced back in February. A couple months later, I shifted back to being undecided after some disappointment with his foreign policy rhetoric.
Nowadays, with Obama's campaign in a malaise, a deep sense of disappointment has set in. While I'm not ready to declare him finished, I certainly feel that the senator from Illinois has only a few chances to pull himself back into this race in a meaningful way. Below the fold, I'll try and discuss what has gone wrong - and why I'm less than pleased with Obama.
The Campaign
I'll start with what seems to be good at the grassroots level. In a recent post over at MyDD, Todd Beeton points out how the Obama campaign is building a district-level canvassing effort:
Clinton has been wrapping up the high-profile endorsements -- Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa -- and building a traditional, centralized campaign organization. Obama has been trying to harness the energy that has brought thousands of people to his campaign rallies.
The Clinton campaign has established two state headquarters, one in San Francisco and the other in L.A., and has hired seven full-time staffers. Obama has an L.A. office and four paid staffers, with another likely to be added soon. Both have fleshed out the staffs at their headquarters with a raft of volunteers.
The Clinton campaign has focused on high-density Democratic regions such as L.A. and the Bay Area. The Obama campaign is trying to build networks in each congressional district; most state Democratic delegates are awarded to candidates based on how well they do in each district, not statewide. So far Obama has committees in 40 of the 53 districts.
It's this 53-congressional district strategy that was on full display yesterday, as Obama's California state campaign director as well as his CA field director spoke to motivate the crowd to join the Santa Barbara area local campaigns. Their goal is to create 53 cd teams, within which they will have a city team within which they will have community teams and then finally precinct teams. This is about engaging the people on the ground to spread the word about Obama, wear your buttons and stickers, they urged us, e-mail your friends. They're banking on the peer to peer method of communicating as being the most effective to win in such a huge state as California.
In addition, Obama also has the most campaign offices in Iowa. One would imagine that if the sort of precinct-level organizing is being done in California is also being done in Iowa and New Hampshire, it would give a boost to Obama in the poll numbers there. However, Iowa polling has shown an inability of Obama to either make a push past Hillary Clinton or John Edwards. Similarly, national polling has not been too kind for Obama, either. In a detailed analysis of national polling I did a couple of months back, I noted that Obama had to find a way to expand his support. What appears to have happened since then it the exact opposite - Clinton's lead over Obama has grown larger in recent polling, with most estimates putting her roughly 20 percentage points up.
How did this happen? One of the main reasons, I feel, is that Obama has been running a campaign that is short on boldness (or, to use one of the candidate's favored words, audacity) but long on boilerplate. Take a look at a campaign ad he has running in Iowa, entitled 'What If':
Watching this, I am struck by a couple of things. First, it cannot be a good sign that Obama is using his DNC speech as the main underlying theme. Has he not said anything since then that is noteworthy or as inspirational? Secondly, it falls into the trap of running through a laundry list of accomplishments that he's achieved in the Illinois State Senate and the U.S. Senate. It's a fairly transparent attempt at countering the 'lack of experience' knock, but it's not anything memorable - like the Bill Richardson ads that highlighted his accomplishments while getting a chuckle out of the viewer.
Another problem is the man behind the candidate: David Axelrod. Just as he did in 2004 on John Edwards' campaign, Axelrod is guiding a campaign more towards one of style over substance. While Obama has become more focused on policy, when the campaign first started, it was all about selling Obama's personal story. While voters should like their candidates - and I have no doubt Obama is very well-liked across the spectrum of Democratic primary voters, even if they don't support him - it was clear that Obama's weakness was never going to be likability or charisma. It was going to be experience, and the campaign did not shift its focus quickly enough to that issue. Now he is badly trailing, probably for good, in the 'experience' category. While he leads in the same poll when it comes to 'change', the problem is that Obama has become trapped in being classified in the experience-change dichotomy. Without being able to forcefully argue that he is qualified to be president, people have become less inclined to support him - and more likely to support Clinton.
The Rhetoric
As I noted above, I moved from being a nominal Obama supporter (albeit one who was excited by his candidacy) to undecided because of his comment that we can't 'play chicken' when it comes to funding the troops. Arguably, this should be Obama's greatest strength; he is by far the best orator of the group. We all know how he did at the 2004 DNC. His speech in Selma this past March was amazing. The problem is, though, that when it comes to matters of policy, Obama becomes a much different - he becomes just another politician. Here's an excerpt from his recent speech on Iraq:
The American people have had enough of the shifting spin. We've had enough of extended deadlines for benchmarks that go unmet. We've had enough of mounting costs in Iraq and missed opportunities around the world. We've had enough of a war that should never have been authorized and should never have been waged.
I opposed this war from the beginning. I opposed the war in 2002. I opposed it in 2003. I opposed it in 2004. I opposed it in 2005. I opposed it in 2006. I introduced a plan in January to remove all of our combat brigades by next March. And I am here to say that we have to begin to end this war now.
My plan for ending the war would turn the page in Iraq by removing our combat troops from Iraq's civil war; by taking a new approach to press for a new accord on reconciliation within Iraq; by talking to all of Iraq's neighbors to press for a compact in the region; and by confronting the human costs of this war.
This has been a serious flaw in Obama's rhetoric when it comes to Iraq. He has always chosen to highlight his initial opposition to the war when the topic comes up for discussion. What he fails to do is distinguish himself from anyone else on the issue of Iraq now, particularly relative to Clinton. Chris Bowers at Open Left highlighted the lack of substantive difference between Obama and Clinton on the issue of residual forces (also discussed here). And on the upcoming supplemental, it hasn't been Obama (or Clinton and Joe Biden, for that matter) who have been standing up and loudly talking about opposing the supplemental (of those in the Senate). It's been Chris Dodd. Today, Obama's comments don't particularly inspire, either (emphasis is mine):
One option is to just give the president a blank check, and to say 'whatever you say Mr. President here, you keep on doing what you're doing.' I don't think that is an acceptable option. Right now the question -- one way of ending the war would be to impose a timetable where we would have all our combat troops out. And I had a bill that provided that timetable of March 30th. We passed it with a majority voting for that in the Senate and in the House but the problem was the president vetoed that bill and to overcome a veto in the senate you gotta' have 67 votes so were about 15 votes short. We were hoping to persuade enough Republican senators and Republican representatives to change their positions in order to override the President's veto. And I'll be honest with you right now, it doesn't look like were going to get that many votes, but I think it's important for everybody here to put pressure on Republican congressmen and Senators who have not recognized that were on a failed course so that we can at least see more votes on that bill.
What about your role, Senator Obama? In a previous diary, I asked him (along with Clinton) to show strong leadership on the upcoming Petraeus report and the supplemental bill. Obama's comments, however, don't make any mention of any leading role that he can (and should) take. Instead, it's our responsibility to hound Republicans in Congress about the vote. That isn't what leadership is about. In fact, I would argue that Obama is demonstrating no leadership whatsoever on the supplemental bill so far. If Obama's introduction of his old withdrawal bill is any indication, his new speech on Iraq may be more of something to fall back on while he's on the campaign trail - as opposed to a policy that he is going to earnestly try and get passed in the Senate.
There are other issues that Obama could probably be rightfully criticized about - whether it's his universal health care plan or his fairly disappointing stances on energy and the environment. But I wanted to focus on Iraq here because Iraq is the issue that is going to dominate the primary process - and Obama has done a poor job of leading on the issue, as well as speaking out loud and clear about what needs to be done.
The Disappointment
It's easy to say that there is no perfect politician. Even Howard Dean, the first politician to unlock the full potential of the then-burgeoning political blogosphere, has his faults. When it comes to Obama, though, my mind always goes back to this article in New York Magazine:
A clever line, sure, but patently bogus—for, given the extent of Obama’s celebrity, he’s hardly an ordinary backbencher. Yet how many times has he used his megaphone to advance a bold initiative or champion a controversial cause? Zero. Instead, Obama has tempered his once-fiery stances on such issues as Iraq and health care; his proposals on alternative energy and global warming are weak beer compared with those of, say, Al Gore. He seems a man laboring to stay something of a cipher—a strategy no less calculated than Hillary’s conspicuous lunges to the center or McCain’s lurches to the right.
Plainly, this strategy has worked for Obama so far. The excitement he’s generated isn’t issue-based: It’s stylistic. His popularity is rooted in his calm, consensus-seeking, deliberative demeanor and in his calls to common purpose. The question, however, is how well this brand of popularity will hold up when voters learn more about him—from trivial things, such as the fact that he’s a smoker, to his fairly conventional liberal policy positions—in the course of a primary campaign. In Iowa, New Hampshire, and other key early states, his leading rivals (Clinton, John Edwards, John Kerry, perhaps Gore) are known commodities, whose supporters are well aware of who they are, warts and all. Nothing remotely similar can be said right now of Obama.
Obama was a cipher - in all manners, including ones that the magazine skipped over. His rhetoric can be seen in many different ways, and what he believes can also be subject to interpretation. And the problem is that after his speech in 2004, he became everything to everyone. It was inevitable as the primary campaign aged, Obama would become something less of a cipher to some of us. Unfortunately, what I've seen is a letdown. Some might call it pragmatism, but he's been very cautious with his rhetoric. His calls for 'change' ring fairly hollow, as it's become quite clear that Obama has been the consummate politician since he entered the Illinois State Senate. He has an amazing base of support, but the campaign is afraid to let anyone else have control.
It's a damn shame, too. I've supported Obama at times when it wasn't popular to. I thought the MySpace debacle with Joe Anthony was overblown. The criticism leveled at Obama when it came to his spokesperson, Robert Gibbs, was an old case of sour grapes to a degree. Back in December, when Obama was openly contemplating a presidential run, I wrote that he represented the next generation in politics.
While Obama himself may be from a different generation than most politicians, he is still playing within their rules. And that's why I'm more disappointed - and saddened, somewhat - to see Obama failing to make any headway since entering the race. He clearly has a progressive background, and he was one of the most liberal state senators in Illinois. He was right about Iraq. He has charisma in spades - charisma that the Democratic Party hasn't seen since the Kennedys.
There is so much more that Obama could be than he is right now. And that's why it is hard to see him struggle so mightily at this juncture. There's absolutely no excuse for him not to be blowing away the field at this stage of the game. He has the potential.