David Remnick of the New Yorker has a long interview with Barack Obama online. Some excerpts:
Personal ambition
- I think that what [Senator Robert Byrd is] absolutely right about is that we tend to think about politics in terms of individual ambition, and most of us who get there—I write in the book that, no matter what people say, there’s some level of megalomania involved in getting to the United States Senate.
Working with the right
- I constantly see opportunities for collaboration across ideological lines to get stuff done. But you have to be the one who’s dictating how the compromises work. If it’s somebody who’s not interested in compromising who’s in charge, you can come up with all sorts of good ideas, and they’ll stiff you.
Hillary
- I think very highly of Hillary. The more I get to know her, the more I admire her. I think she’s the most disciplined—one of the most disciplined people—I’ve ever met. She’s one of the toughest. She’s got an extraordinary intelligence. And she is, she’s somebody who’s in this stuff for the right reasons. She’s passionate about moving the country forward on issues like health care and children. So it’s not clear to me what differences we’ve had since I’ve been in the Senate. I think what people might point to is our different assessments of the war in Iraq, although I’m always careful to say that I was not in the Senate, so perhaps the reason I thought it was such a bad idea was that I didn’t have the benefit of U.S. intelligence. And, for those who did, it might have led to a different set of choices. So that might be something that sort of is obvious. But, again, we were in different circumstances at that time: I was running for the U.S. Senate, she had to take a vote, and casting votes is always a difficult test.
Bush administration
- I think that this Administration has done great damage to this country... Foreign policy, I think, is the most obvious. I think the war in Iraq has been—was flawed not just in execution but in conception, and has done enormous damage to our standing around the world. I think it has weakened us in our capacity to deal with terrorism. It has—we have used so much political capital there that we have not been effective on issues like Iran, North Korea, Darfur. We have no chits to use up. It has gutted our military. It’s going to probably take the same amount of time that it took for the military to recover from Vietnam. That’s how long it’s going to take for us to be able to recover when it comes to Iraq. And the tone of unilateralism—which, by the way, I think is reversible, just not while this Administration is in office—but that tone has created an atmosphere around the world that is impeding us on a whole host of issues.
Religion and doubt
- We have come to define religion in absolutist, fundamentalist terms. So to be a believer is to be a fundamentalist in some fashion. And I guess what I was trying to describe is a faith that admits doubt, and uncertainty, and mystery. Because, ultimately, I think that’s how most people understand their faith. In fact, it’s not faith if you’re absolutely certain.
Cleaning up the Bush mess
- I think the next President is going to have a lot of problems to clean up and not a lot of resources to work with. So whoever is elected is going to have to have a conversation with the American people about what our challenges are, what steps we can take, how long it’s going to take, and ask that they join, that they take ownership in this project.
Three priorities
- It is hard to anticipate at this point where we’re going to be in Iraq. But first priority would be to stabilize and extricate ourselves from the morass that we’re in right now... I think would be one of the most important things a new President can do, is to essentially figure out what is the updated version of the post-World War II order that was structured by Truman and Acheson, and Marshall and Kennan—what does that look like? What is our national-security strategy? Because we’ve never gone through that process... On the domestic front, I would say that it is time for the Democrats to get over what happened in ’94, and to move on an aggressive plan for health-care reform in this country. And I personally think universal health care remains a vital goal for us to meet. And I think for us to shy away from it robs the Democrats of any claim of dealing with one of the most pressing issues... The third, which I’ve already, I think, hinted at, is energy. I believe Al Gore—and the other, you know, ten thousand scientists out there. I know there are those two holdouts in the White House. From a national-security posture, there’s not a better thing we could do—for example, dealing with proliferation issues in Iran—than to drive the price of oil down to twenty-five bucks a barrel. It’s the single biggest thing we could do to effectuate change and cut the legs out of some of the fundamentalist impulses in the Middle East. And so why we’re not pursuing that in a very aggressive way baffles me. And I think the country’s ready for it. I mentioned that, travelling around the country, what I’ve been struck by is the degree to which, despite gas prices going down, the issue of energy policy is still registering very high among voters. They recognize that the current path we’re on is unsustainable.