I went and saw Barack Obama speak Thursday night in Durham. The rally came at an interesting time for me as I had just moved in my own mind from being an Obama supporter back to the 'undecided' column, mostly because of his comments on Social Security. But I was interested to see if he might win me back over.
The rally was fun: it was at North Carolina Central University, a mostly black University in the middle of Durham, NC. Barack got lots of audience feedback like "that's true, that's true" and "tell it Barack." It was quite an event and Barack came across as likable, sincere and thoughtful. But I expected that and the rally didn't sway me back into feeling like "he's my guy." I realized that I don't want to base my vote on the quality of a candidate's stump speech. While that's not inconsequential, I'm looking for more substantive reasons to base my vote.
The very next day (yesterday) I read this very interesting profile of Obama in the NYT. The whole article is worth reading, but what struck me most was this passage:
In mainstream foreign-policy circles, Barack Obama is seen as the true bearer of this vision. "There are maybe 200 people on the Democratic side who think about foreign policy for a living," as one such figure, himself unaffiliated with a campaign, estimates. "The vast majority have thrown in their lot with Obama." Hillary Clinton's inner circle consists of the senior-most figures from her husband's second term in office — the former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, the former national security adviser Sandy Berger and the former United Nations ambassador Richard Holbrooke. But drill down into one of Washington's foreign-policy hives, whether the Carnegie Endowment or the Brookings Institution or Georgetown University , and you're bound to hit Obama supporters. Most of them served in the Clinton administration, too, and thus might be expected to support Hillary Clinton. But many of these younger and generally more liberal figures have decamped to Obama. And they are ardent. As Ivo Daalder, a former National Security Council official under President Clinton who now heads up a team advising Obama on nonproliferation issues, puts it, "There's a feeling that this is a guy who's going to help us transform the way America deals with the world." Ex-Clintonites in Obama's inner circle also include the president's former lawyer, Greg Craig, and Richard Danzig, his Navy secretary.
While I'm repelled by the idea of looking to great wise men like David Broder for guidance in how to vote, it remains true that I myself am not a foreign policy expert, or any other kind of policy expert for that matter. It seems reasonable to look out for people who have devoted their lives to these matters to see how they assess the candidates. If the 'vast majority' of Democratic foreign policy thinkers have thrown in with Obama, even with the knowledge that Clinton is more likely to win, that says something to me.
What is impressing these people is not only his policies, but the way he comes to them. While I'm not interested in which candidate would be the most fun to have a beer with, personality is important insofar as it affects the candidate's decision making process. Anthony Lake, a former adviser to President Clinton, met Obama when he had just begun to consider a run at the Senate:
Impressed, he began contributing ideas. When Obama came to Washington as a senator and joined the Foreign Relations Committee, Lake continued to work with him on occasion. Like others, Lake was impressed not so much by Obama's policy prescriptions as by his temperament and intellectual habits. "He has," Lake says, "the kind of mind that works its way through complexities by listening and giving some edge of legitimacy to various points of view before he comes down on his, and that point of view embraces complexity." This awareness of complexity felt like a kind of politics itself and a repudiation of the Bush administration's categorical thinking.
Personally, that is the kind of endorsement that means a lot. After having read this article I decided to put myself tentatively back in Obama's camp.
[NOTE: If Edwards wins Iowa then all bets are off... A win there could very well make him the Hillary alternative, which I would take without hesitation. Not so much out of great animosity towards Clinton, who I think would make a decent president... I just feel either Obama and Edwards would make a better president. Both of them impress me greatly. But the fact that Obama has made such a deep impression on this core group of Democratic foreign policy thinkers, people who deal with these issues in a much more detailed and nuanced way than I have the time or mind for, suggests to me that he may be the right person for the job.]
Now these 'foreign policy thinkers' are of course not political analysts, so they may not be so savvy on issues of 'electability,' but at this point I've decided that issue is a game of bullshit anyway. As a voter I'm much more concerned with what a candidate will actually do, because that is something real we can talk about. When we drift into considering everything in terms of how it will play in the media and with voters we drift into realm of spin and hype. Certainly a campaign must consider the media war, pushing their frames and memes and all that. (That's an area where the Obama camp could use some improvement, frankly) But as a voter, I'd like to base my vote on something more substantive.
Of course foreign policy is only one issue. Personally it's probably my most important issue, but I also care deeply about the environment, the Constitution, economic justice and other issues. I would be curious how Democratic thinkers in those areas assess the current field of candidates.
I also still remain troubled by Obama's use of Social Security as an issue to criticize Hillary on. Not only do I disagree on the merits, it seems incredibly dumb from a political perspective. First, why should he expect Democratic primary voters to get excited about his flanking to HRC's right on this core Democratic issue? Second, he's providing an opening for Republicans who want to insist there are huge problems with the program. I haven't heard him bring this issue up again recently, so maybe he's dropped it, but it still makes me wonder what he was thinking in the first place. That's why my support remains 'tentative' for now.