A unified Obama theory

This is what the election will come down to: Who is Obama and can you trust him?

The answer is not always an easy one.  Many have noted the pitfalls of trying to label Obama.  Is he a naive inexperienced idealist or secret radical; is he a flip-floper or a conventional liberal?  This slipperiness in some ways makes him hard to attack.

The problems isn’t just about deciding on a campaign strategy, as David Brooks notes it is built into who Obama is:

There is a sense that because of his unique background and temperament, Obama lives apart. He put one foot in the institutions he rose through on his journey but never fully engaged. As a result, voters have trouble placing him in his context, understanding the roots and values in which he is ineluctably embedded.

[. . .]

He was a popular and charismatic professor, but he rarely took part in faculty conversations or discussions about the future of the institution. He had a supple grasp of legal ideas, but he never committed those ideas to paper by publishing a piece of scholarship.

He was in the law school, but not of it.

This has been a consistent pattern throughout his odyssey. His childhood was a peripatetic journey through Kansas, Indonesia, Hawaii and beyond. He absorbed things from those diverse places but was not fully of them.

His college years were spent on both coasts. He was a community organizer for three years but left before he could be truly effective. He became a state legislator, but he was in the Legislature, not of it. He had some accomplishments, but as Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker wrote, he was famously bored by the institution and used it as a stepping stone to higher things.

He was in Trinity United Church of Christ, but not of it, not sharing the liberation theology that energized Jeremiah Wright Jr. He is in the United States Senate, but not of it. He has not had the time nor the inclination to throw himself into Senate mores, or really get to know more than a handful of his colleagues. His Democratic supporters there speak of him fondly, but vaguely.

And so it goes. He is a liberal, but not fully liberal. He has sometimes opposed the Chicago political establishment, but is also part of it. He spoke at a rally against the Iraq war, while distancing himself from many antiwar activists.

As we noted below, this seems to have resulted in an Obama without a core; a personality that creates and assumes identities as he needs them.

I think the American people are right to be suspicious of this, but that doesn’t mean Obama isn’t a traditional liberal politician.  Intellectually, rhetorically, and even personally Obama may be very different.  But when it comes time to vote, he votes like a donwn the line liberal.  His basic world view is government is the basic tool for changing society and should be used whenever and wherever possible; his positions and record reflect that.

What I am trying to offer is a unified theory of Obama criticism of sorts: that Obama is an inexperienced conventional liberal politician who is running on empty symbolism and emotion because that is all he has.  He can’t run on experience as he has very little; ditto accomplishments.  He can’t run on ideology because his brand of liberalism is simply not a majority held view.

Obama ran because he knew this was the dream environment for Democrats.  So he put together a talented team of advisers who studied the Democratic primary system, raised a lot of money, and eked out a narrow win thanks to the superdelegates.

He knows his appeal rests on a light touch by the media who admire his rhetorical skills, his charm, and the symbolism of his race.  He also knows that his appeal rests largely on voter’s fatigue with the Bush/GOP and with their aspirational feelings about race.

Thus he lurches between big speeches meant to mesmerize the media, attacks that seek to link his opponent to President Bush (and accuse him of nefarious tactics including racism), and desperate attempts to appear moderate and safe to swing voters.

This blogs’ raison d’ etre, to use a fancy French term for Obama fans, is to label this as the con it is.  I am not confident enough in psychology or sociology to argue that Obama is running this campaign because he lacks a core (although it is an interesting explanation).  But I am confident that he is running a campaign that reflects symbolism over substance and that is fundamentally designed to convince centrist voters that Obama is safe when he is both liberal and inexperienced and thus incredibly risky.

So I think the way to attack Obama is to hammer home the risk involved in his election.  He is too inexperienced, too liberal, and to slippery to trust with the White House.

Related Reading:

Change We Can Believe In: Barack Obama's Plan to Renew America's Promise

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

Technorati Tags: Obama the symbol