Infected

I am becoming increasingly impressed with Barack Obama, and a bit more wary of Romney, and hopeful for Giuliani. I'm still rather surprised by the kick in the pants that McCain got over the past week. But let me stress the big news. You really have to read the article in the New Yorker about Obama. It gets me past the boredom of his 'Dreams of My Father' book which I put down two days after I got it and haven't picked up since. I think Obama is really an interesting thinker, and it actually turns out that his style of problem-solving is very much like my own.

This is, again, partly a matter of temperament. “By nature, I’m not somebody who gets real worked up about things,” Obama writes in his second book. “When I see Ann Coulter or Sean Hannity baying across the television screen, I find it hard to take them seriously.” He tends to think of his opponents as deluded and ridiculous, rather than as demons. “I’ve never been a conspiracy theorist,” he says. “I’ve never believed there are a bunch of people out there who are pulling all the strings and pressing all the buttons. And the reason is that the older I get, the more time I spend meeting people in government or in the corporate arena, the more human everybody becomes. What I do believe is that those with money, those with influence, those with control over how resources are allocated in our society, are very protective of their interests, and they can rationalize infinitely the reasons why they should have more money and power than anyone else, why that’s somehow good for the society as a whole.”

So let me put it to you this way. Right now I am showing some of the symptoms of an Obama infection. I am beginning to look at him in a new way, which is to say actually buying into some of the hype about the way his campaign operates fundamentally differently and that having a salient effect on the electorate. This week, people are sending me invitations to the Obama Walk-A-Thons that are sprouting up like weeds around Southern California. The fact that he is demanding of the electorate is really stunning, it reads to me like he's becoming more like Kennedy vis a vis 'ask not'.

I would say that right now there is a 20% chance that Obama's campaign will make me break with Republicans based strictly on the fact that it is evolving into something which is not business as usual and, as I said, is truly engaging the electorate in novel, yet demanding ways. The New Yorker article, and especially the wariness I'm hearing from some liberals, is convincing me that he's no softy when it comes to matters of national security. As I said in Obama the Neocon, he's striking the proper pose. And it's surprising to me that this seems to be going without comment.

But really, just check this out: (Emphasis mine)

“There is a running thread in American history of idealism that can express itself powerfully and appropriately, as it did after World War II with the creation of the United Nations and the Marshall Plan, when we recognized that our security and prosperity depend on the security and prosperity of others. But the same idealism can express itself in a sense that we can remake the world any way we want by flipping a switch, because we’re technologically superior or we’re wealthier or we’re morally superior. And when our idealism spills into that kind of naïveté and an unwillingness to acknowledge history and the weight of other cultures, then we get ourselves into trouble, as we did in Vietnam.”

In his view of history, in his respect for tradition, in his skepticism that the world can be changed any way but very, very slowly, Obama is deeply conservative. There are moments when he sounds almost Burkean. He distrusts abstractions, generalizations, extrapolations, projections. It’s not just that he thinks revolutions are unlikely: he values continuity and stability for their own sake, sometimes even more than he values change for the good. Take health care, for example. “If you’re starting from scratch,” he says, “then a single-payer system”—a government-managed system like Canada’s, which disconnects health insurance from employment—“would probably make sense. But we’ve got all these legacy systems in place, and managing the transition, as well as adjusting the culture to a different system, would be difficult to pull off. So we may need a system that’s not so disruptive that people feel like suddenly what they’ve known for most of their lives is thrown by the wayside.”

It seems to me that this is the Barack Obama that conservatives want to see emerge in ten years when he becomes the shoe-in that people already infected with Obama fever believe is the case today. The thing is that I think folks like me still strongly believe that he has got to grow some backbone on lines where a conciliatory attitude my work, but compromise does not. And in his effort to appeal to youth and evolve the way campaigns are run, that hard line is blurred. Still, there may come a time when he shows that he can be forceful which he's going to have to be as an executive. He's still very Congressional, and I think he has the liberty of taking the time to suss out synergies because he's not responsible for solutions and consequences of failure. America doesn't need a Consultant in Chief, but a Commander.

So the line on Obama today is that he's showing some interesting colors and depth. But the bottom line is that it is better to have a president who is strongly wrong than one who is weakly right. The ship of state needs hard ruddering.