It is not simply a matter of stagecraft. The mass adulation Barack Obama's international tour has received, Frank Rich argues in this week's column, is a matter of the power Illinois's junior senator has amassed to shape events, become must-see television, and set the agenda for what politics are discussed in this country.
What made this possible? The title of Rich's column gives a hint: How Obama Became Acting President.
As George W. Bush has become a lame duck despised at home (where his approval ratings are at historical lows) and abroad, a leadership gap emerged before the last president had left office.. Shrub fatigue produced unprecedented interest in the presidential race two years before Bush's term was due to end.
John McCain could have stepped into the breach, yet has shown an inability -- for Rich, a troubling inability -- to set an agenda for how he would lead the country. In contrast, "Obama-branded change is snowballing, whether it’s change you happen to believe in or not."
Looking back now, we can see that the fortnight preceding the candidate’s flight to Kuwait was like a sequence in an old movie where wind blows away calendar pages to announce an epochal plot turn. First, on July 7, the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, dissed Bush dogma by raising the prospect of a withdrawal timetable for our troops. Then, on July 15, Mr. McCain suddenly noticed that more Americans are dying in Afghanistan than Iraq and called for more American forces to be sent there. It was a long-overdue recognition of the obvious that he could no longer avoid: both Robert Gates, the defense secretary, and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had already called for more American troops to battle the resurgent Taliban, echoing the policy proposed by Mr. Obama a year ago.
On July 17 we learned that President Bush, who had labeled direct talks with Iran "appeasement," would send the No. 3 official in the State Department to multilateral nuclear talks with Iran. Lest anyone doubt that the White House had moved away from the rigid stand endorsed by Mr. McCain and toward Mr. Obama’s, a former Rumsfeld apparatchik weighed in on The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page: "Now Bush Is Appeasing Iran."
Within 24 hours, the White House did another U-turn, endorsing an Iraq withdrawal timetable as long as it was labeled a "general time horizon." In a flash, as Mr. Obama touched down in Kuwait, Mr. Maliki approvingly cited the Democratic candidate by name while laying out a troop-withdrawal calendar of his own that, like Mr. Obama’s, would wind down in 2010. On Tuesday, the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, announced a major drawdown of his nation’s troops by early 2009.
Obama-branded change is not limited to foreign policy this month. Texas oilman/Swift Boat financier T. Boone Pickens and Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (a McCain supporter who recently voiced to Tom Brokaw a willingness to serve in an Obama administration) have broken with McCain and the GOP's "Drill Now, Pay Less" solution to the energy crisis. Pickens's face is all over TV in ads promoting wind power rather than drilling, putting him closer to possible Obama energy czar Al Gore than to the Republican nominee on energy policy.
Rich then goes on to criticize McCain, certainly not the only observer to do that in a week that had Jon Stewart despairing that the senior Senator from Arizona had been attacked by falling applesauce jars in a supermarket. Rich notes that McCain is being reactive to Obama's agenda, mouthing Obama's themes on CEO bonuses, relief measures for indebted homeowners, and probably will take up fist bumps in the near future.
This utter inability to demonstrate leadership -- or even be remotely factual about events in Iraq (or on the "Iraq-Pakistan border") -- Rich argues, raises questions about McCain's fitness to be president. Especially in comparison to the words and images Barack Obama has presented us. A whining old man muttering McCarthyesque charges of treason against his opponent, complaining about the media, and reading the price of milk off notecards does not seem like the figure to lead the United States out of recession and war.
Rich notes that the election has not happened yet, and Obama could yet lose it despite a nation and a world hungering for change and our allies and our Congress moving increasingly to Obama's vision of the post-Bush world.
Here, Rich neglects to discuss another way in which Obama is setting the agenda. The way in which the Obama campaign is organizing thousands of volunteers to register hundreds of thousands of voters across the nation. As kath 25 told us earlier this week, we can all set up our own voter registration efforts, and do our part to make Obama's vision of a post-Bush world a reality.
An Obama presidency is not guaranteed. But every day, more people across the country and around the world see it as desirable. Our work now registering voters may make that desire a reality in the fall.
Update: Thank you for placing this diary on the rec list. I hope Frank Rich's optimistic words about the tone of this campaign inspire even more people to get involved to register more new voters. (Update added to erase any possible subtlety in my pitch at the end of the diary.)