There’s been a recurring criticism against Barack Obama within the presidential primary discussions at MyDD and Daily Kos, and it seems to follow along the lines of a criticism floating through the overall landscape of the presidential primary. The criticism is that Obama is campaigning primarily on his personality and his let’s-work-together rhetoric, and is not offering either a bold vision of the future or bold plans for what he would do once in office. Neil Sinhababu articulates the criticism from his point of view as an Edwards supporter; Matt Stoller has a post up today arguing that Obama is losing what he calls “the bar fight primary.”
I am not going to say that there is nothing to this criticism. Reports out of a health care forum held recently suggest that Obama does not have nearly as much detail at his disposal on the issue right now as John Edwards or Hillary Clinton do. (Edwards has a seven-page PDF overview of his proposed plan on his website, which is far more than Obama has on his.) There is a segment of the electorate that prizes grasp of issues, and right now I would say Obama is not their candidate. I kinda hope he might be as the campaign goes on, but I can’t say that for sure. And I can understand why some other early adopters might look elsewhere and find what they’re looking for. What I would like to argue is that there is an important substantial point wrapped within Obama’s rhetoric, and it’s one that might make it worth waiting to see if those details arrive.
The major point that Obama is making in his rhetoric is that this has to be “your campaign.” He’s touting the huge number of people who contributed to his campaign in the first quarter and the number of house parties that his supporters organized at the end of March. If Obama can keep mobilizing people like this, I think it has the potential to be a substantive shift in and of itself, because it might help close the gaps between what a candidate says when he is campaigning and what he does once he has to govern.
Let me take a step outside the presidential campaign for a moment. In 2002, Ed Rendell ran for governor and managed to upset Bob Casey for the Democratic nomination on his way to a convincing general election victory. One of the centerpieces of his campaign was a proposal to allow slots gambling at horse racing tracks and a small number of additional facilities in order to finance a more equitable system of education funding in the state. Five years later we have the slots gambling but not the school funding overhaul. Rendell had a huge amount of trouble getting his proposals through the state legislature despite his overwhelming victory – in part because the voters that elected him also elected a Republican legislature, and in part because that bloc of issue-oriented voters I mentioned is not a majority bloc by any means. So there was no major public outcry when Rendell’s proposals did not go through. (And Pennsylvania’s voters are capable of raising an outcry – just look at what happened when the legislature put through a really ridiculous pay hike.) Right now I’m watching Philadelphia mayoral candidates put out policy proposals galore, and the big question is whether they’ll be able to make any of these things happen, in part because they require approval by City Council or – even more daunting – cooperation from the state and federal governments.
So the gap between campaign promise and execution is a key one. Neil writes:
I know perfectly well what Edwards would do — he’d pass an amazing health care plan, take major steps to reduce our dependence on oil, and make an unprecedented effort to fight global poverty. He’s made major policy commitments on all these issues.
But I don’t think Neil can actually know that Edwards would pass an amazing plan, or take major steps. He can probably know that Edwards would propose these things. Once proposed, they would face filibuster threats, lobbying efforts, and tinkering from congressional Democrats. So how do we know that Edwards would be able to get his proposals enacted after running through that obstacle course? You might say, Well, if Edwards gets elected, that must be a mandate for his legislative agenda. But that large group of voters who don’t care or even know about issues dilutes an elected official’s ability to claim such a mandate. Look at Rendell. Look at George W. Bush and Social Security privatization.
So Obama’s legislative record in the state and federal Senate comes back into play as a consideration. He’s built a reputation for being able to get people together and forge coalitions to enact legislation. I think those are useful job skills for a president to have. But Neil is right – legislative skills alone won’t be enough to deal with a high-visibility issue like health care. It would help a lot of if there were clear public pressure on legislators to support a particular plan – it might solidify Democratic support and peel off a few key Republicans. And I believe that Obama’s campaign approach is geared toward shifting our political culture so that such public pressure is easier to mobilize. The Portsmouth Herald wrote the following in its coverage of a health care forum that Obama held recently:
All the views and ideas expressed Tuesday in Portsmouth and at the Iowa meeting will be put on the Obama campaign’s Web site, www.barackobama.com, with an invitation for further public comment. In a few weeks, Obama said he and his policy group would synthesize all the comments and put a draft health care proposal up on the Web site for further comment.
What comes out of that will be announced as Obama campaign’s health care policy, but he said it will really be a template for what he wants to accomplish as president. He said he will remain open to new and better ideas.
Look at that procedure. If Obama really goes through that request-for-comments stage, and then puts out a proposal that takes the feedback seriously, he’ll have given ownership of that proposal to all the people who submitted comments. He’ll also give ownership to other people involved in the campaign, because it won’t just be Obama’s strategy. It’ll be their strategy. And all of a sudden early Obama’s lack of specifics becomes an advantage rather than a liability, because it brings people into the process and amplifies the prospects for change.
Is this a pie in the sky reading? It could be. But it would also track with the things I’ve read Obama say, and with his experience as a community organizer that he cites on the campaign trail. I go back to his first book, Dreams from My Father, because I believe it gives readers an honest glimpse at who Obama is, written long before he was a national figure. There’s a passage where Obama discusses a bus trip to the Chicago Housing Authority with some residents, where the residents were able to arrange some media exposure and get the CHA to listen to their concerns. It so vividly captured what I think of as the promise of democracy that I included it in my dissertation:
I changed as a result of that bus trip, in a fundamental way. It was the sort of change that’s important not because it alters your concrete circumstances in some way (wealth, security, fame) but because it hints at what might be possible and therefore spurs you on, beyond the immediate exhilaration, beyond any subsequent disappointments, to retrieve that thing that you once, ever so briefly, held in your hand. . . .
I began to see something wonderful happening. The parents began talking about ideas for future campaigns. New parents got involved. . . . It was as though Sadie’s small, honest step had broken into a reservoir of hope, allowing people in Altgeld to reclaim a power they had had all along.
I truly believe that Obama cares about unleashing that power. Even in The Audacity of Hope, which is far more obviously a campaign document, I see this commitment. He puts forward an idea of democracy that fits within the theoretical framework described as deliberative democracy – even in his essay on the role of faith in politics, he stresses the idea that as citizens, we owe it to one another to justify our desired political results to one another using reasons that are publicly available. If Obama is really successful at implementing that vision of civic discourse, his campaign will most certainly have a powerful substance at its core.