Category: Barack Obama

Josh Patashnik does for the old dominion what Robert Johnson did for Maine. Why do we assume these are natural Obama wins? The current polling, on the other hand, is here. And it seems to back Obama.

In asking ourselves why Obama is doing so well among the young, I found this 1999 Ted Halstead Atlantic article prescient:

Three quarters of Generation X agree with the statement "Our generation has an important voice, but no one seems to hear it." Whatever this voice may be, it does not fit comfortably within existing partisan camps. "The old left-right paradigm is not working anymore," according to the novelist Douglas Coupland, who coined the term "Generation X." Neil Howe and William Strauss, who have written extensively on generational issues, have argued in these pages that from the Generation X perspective "America’s greatest need these days is to clear out the underbrush of name-calling and ideology so that simple things can work again."

If Xers have any ideology, it is surely pragmatism. In an attempt to be more specific Coupland has claimed, "Coming down the pipe are an extraordinarily large number of fiscal conservatives who are socially left." The underlying assumption here is that the Xer political world view stems simplistically from a combination of the 1960s social revolution and the 1980s economic revolution. This kind of thinking has led some to describe young adults as a generation of libertarians, who basically want government out of their bedrooms and out of their pocketbooks. As it turns out, however, the political views of most Xers are more complex and more interesting than that.

Is Obama fiscally conservative? Not in the way I’d prefer. He’ll spend too much. But for those of us conservatives who still believe – sorry, NRO – that the government should balance its books and not promise any more than it can realistically provide, Obama is far more fiscally conservative than Bush Republicans. He is at least cognizant that money doesn’t grow on trees. McCain helps narrow the choice – he’s one of the few fiscal conservatives who walks the walk. But McCain is just generationally off for the Obama generation, I suspect. I love the guy, but I’m the old guard now.

(Photo: an Obama rally last year in Washington Square Park, New York City. By Emmanuel Dunand/Getty.)

Headline Junky notes:

With all the attention that’s been paid to Obama’s Red State appeal, I’m not sure I’ve seen it mentioned that his path to the Democratic nomination, should he end up winning it, will have curiously resembled the strategy that the GOP used to win the last two general elections.

And Clinton’s a PC. Doug Kendall coined the now-obvious analogy. That quiet genius, Noam Cohen, concurs. But he notes one worrying aspect of the comparison for Obama supporters:

While Apple’s ad campaign maligns the PC by using an annoying man in a plain suit as its personification, it is not clear that aligning with the trendy Mac aesthetic is good politics. The iPod may be a dominant music player, but the Mac is still a niche computer. PC, no doubt, would win the Electoral College by historic proportions (with Mac perhaps carrying Vermont).

Perhaps the most telling critique of Obama, to my mind, is his lack of executive experience. (The same can be said for Clinton, of course, if you don’t count the First Lady period, when she insists her husband was the president.)  I asked him directly last year why a voter should back someone who has never run anything bigger than a legislative office. He responded by pointing to his nascent campaign. He observed out that he was up against the full Clinton establishment, all the chits she and her husband had acquired over the years, and the apparatus they had constructed within the party. He had to build a national campaign from scratch, raise money, staff an extremely complex electoral map, and make key decisions on spending and travel. He asked me to judge his executive skills by observing how he was managing a campaign.

By that standard, who isn’t impressed? A first term senator – a black urban liberal – raised more money, and continues to raise much more money, than Senator Clinton. More to the point, the money he has raised has not come from the well-connected fat-cats who do things like donate to the Clinton library. His base is much wider, broader and internet-based than hers. It has many more small donors.

Now look at the strategy he laid out last year, as he explained it to me and others. Iowa was the key. If he didn’t win Iowa, it was over. But if he could win Iowa, he would prove the principle that a black man could transcend the racial issue, helping in New Hampshire, and then also helping him peel off what was then majority black support for the Clintons in South Carolina. Then his strategy was meticulous organization – and you saw that in Iowa, as well as yesterday’s caucus states. Everything he told me has been followed through. And the attention to detail – from the Alaska caucus to the Nevada cooks – has been striking.

Now consider the psychological and emotional challenges of this campaign. It has been brutal. It has included many highly emotional moments – and occasions when racism and sexism and all sorts of hot-button issues have emerged. Then there was the extraordinary spectacle of a former president and spouse bringing the full weight of the Democratic establishment and the full prestige of two terms in the White House to dismiss some of Obama’s arguments as a "fairy tale" and frame him as another Jesse Jackson.

How did the candidates deal with this? The vastly more experienced and nerves-of-steel Clinton clearly went through some wild mood-swings. Obama gave an appearance at least of preternatural coolness under fire, a steady message that others came to mimic, and a level of oratory that still stuns this longtime debater. In the middle of this very hot zone, he exhibit a coolness and steeliness that is a mark of presidential timber. He played tough – but he didn’t play nasty. Keeping the high road in a contest like this – without ever playing the race card or the victim card – is an achievement. Building a movement on top of that is more impressive still. So far, he has combined Romney’s money with Clinton’s organizational skills and Ron Paul’s grass-roots enthusiasm. No other campaign has brought so many dimensions into play.

And he won Missouri.

(Photo: Obama at the Apollo by Hiroko Masuike/Getty.)

Ambers explains:

Credit the campaign’s organization in the caucus states — Obama won supermajorites in Alaska (75%), Kansas (74%), Colorado (68%), Minnesota (68%) and in the primary state of Georgia (68%). Obama’s margin of victory in Illinois was proportionately larger than Clinton’s margin in New York — more than enough to give him some extra delegates.

Fred Siegel is unimpressed with Obama:

Only Clinton derangement syndrome can explain the alliance of so many otherwise thoughtful people of both parties who speak well of the candidacy of a man with scant knowledge of the world who has never been tested and has never run anything larger than a senatorial office. The question that we need to ask is whether this man—who candidly admits, “I’m not a manager”—can manage the vast apparatus of the federal government. Will packaging be enough to deal with our problems?

In 1965, appalled by the unearned adulation for mayoral candidate John Lindsay (who was also considered a future president), Robert Moses warned: “If you elect a matinee idol mayor, you’re going to have a musical comedy administration.” And that’s just what New York got. Substitute “president” for “mayor,” and you can anticipate what might be coming.

This, I predict, will be the main line of argument against Obama in the coming weeks and months (if he wins the nomination). I think the attempt to define him as an old-style left-liberal will fail in the face of the practical difficulties – i.e. what the hell to do in Iraq – ahead of us. And because such lines of argument already seem as exhausted as the people making them.

He likes the man, as many conservatives do. But then:

Whether we’re talking about the Iraq war, monitoring terrorist communications, health care, taxes, education, abortion and the courts, the size of government, or almost anything else, Obama embodies the views of the special-interest groups on the left.

I’m unaware that special interest groups have a position on Iraq. Or is Wehner referring to Halliburton and Blackwater? But let’s review. If a Democrat ran for office today pledging a massive increase in entitlement spending, a decades-long multi-trillion dollar nation-building project in the Middle East, the biggest increase in discretionary spending since LBJ, a huge increase in the power of the executive branch, a doubling of the federal education budget, a de facto amnesty program for 12 million illegal immigrants, and a cool additional $32 trillion to the country’s unfunded liabilities … would Wehner be saying he is out of bounds for conservatives because he is a special interest group liberal?

Nothing in Obama’s policy book comes even close to the massive lurch to the left that Pete Wehner engineered and supported and celebrated when it was done by a Republican president.   

Jonathan Raban notices something important:

I’ve been to those counties, their miles of lonely roads where you can drive for half an hour before encountering another vehicle, their scattered ranches and isolated towns, their seasonal creeks marked by lines of spindly cottonwood trees, the overwhelmingly Caucasian cast of their people. Out there in the mountains, sagebrush and high desert, Obama carried the day by far greater margins than his overall loss of the popular vote to Clinton across the state, and came out of the caucuses with one more delegate than she did.

Remember that in 2004 every American city with a population over 500,000 voted Democrat, and the Republicans won by taking the countryside and the outer suburbs. The blue state/red state division is better expressed in terms of the persistent conflicts between the big cities and their rural hinterlands, over land use, water rights and environmental, class and cultural issues. Red states are simply those where the country can outvote the urban centres, while in blue states the opposite is true. The perception that America has liberal coasts and a conservative interior merely reflects the fact that the coastal states are home to the largest metropolitan areas with the most electoral muscle. Last time around, for instance, Bush easily won the heartland state of Missouri, but was as crushingly defeated by Kerry in St Louis as he was in the cities of New York, Boston, San Francisco and Seattle.

So Obama’s victory over Clinton in rural Nevada says something important about his ability as the apostle of national reconciliation.

And thinking Lincoln. A cool video of Steve Brodner’s artwork in motion.