Discussion at WBUR’s “On Point” with Tom Ashbrook and guests: James Traub, contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine; Laura Washington, columnist for The Chicago Sun-Times; and Andrew Sullivan, senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly and author of the blog "Daily Dish", and callers to the show. 11/6/07
Tom Ashbrook: James Traub, your piece in the Times says, “You know what? Barack Obama may not be the oldest, may not be the most experienced in formal terms, but if you scratch the foreign policy crowd in Washington very deep at all you find a lot of Obama support. Why?”
James Traub: Well, because I think those people feel we’re at a kind of transformational moment. So I think they would say (and I think this is actually something quite similar to what Andrew said in his essay that if you think what we need is just to replace a bad leader with a good leader and to make certain adjustments in the way we behave toward the world, then someone like Hillary, who’s a pragmatic figure and a highly reasonable person, is fine. They would argue, though, that Obama has a kind of intuitive grasp of and also intellectual agreement with a very different kind of vision which requires that we think about foreign policy in a more subtle and complicated way – that we, for example, be far more willing to use diplomacy than we are now, that we recognize that the way we are seen in the world now has a profound shaping principle on the way we can behave in the world. And so, for example, Obama’s emblematic quality, what he incarnates as a young black man who grew up in the third world – what that says to the world, that America would elect such a person as president, is profound all by itself leaving aside what he would or would not do.
TA: More powerful than strategy, more powerful than executive orders, more powerful than experience or inexperience when the chips are down? More powerful than a speeding bullet?! Really?
JT: No. I think -- let’s put it this way – it’s easier to see this incarnational difference between Obama and Hillary than it is to see specific policy differences. I was just talking earlier today with one of Hillary’s leading advisers, who said, “Know what? The dirty little secret is they agree on practically everything. Therefore there are no important distinctions between them.” And I said, “I don’t think that’s right. I think they do agree on almost everything as a matter of policy, but I think matters of temperament, experience, these emblematic qualities – these are actually important, especially now at what I think is a pivotal moment.
TA: Obama is trying to point to them. Of course, he’s sounded warnings before the Iraq war that sound fairly prescient today. Here he is, just a month ago, during a speech in Chicago, laying the blame for the mess in Iraq not just on the Bush administration alone, but on the politics-as-usual crowd in Washington – read “Hillary Clinton.”
Barack Obama [recorded]: The American people weren’t just failed by a president, they were failed by much of Washington, by media which too often reported spin instead of facts, by a foreign policy elite that largely boarded the bandwagon for war, and most of all by the majority of a Congress, a co-equal branch of government, that voted to give the president the open-ended authority to wage war that he uses to this day. So let’s be clear. Without that vote, there would be no war.
TA: …Candidate Barack Obama, just a month ago. Andrew Sullivan, James Traub looks at the American moment in global terms, in foreign policy terms. You’re looking at it and the prism of Barack Obama closer to home, the kind of culture war this country has been in for decades now. Your conclusion about the meaning of his candidacy, the potential in his candidacy?
Andrew Sullivan: I think it’s the first chance for this country to really move beyond the post-Vietnam, baby-boomer culture war that we’ve had. I think it’s a real generational moment. Jim, I’m struck by actually how similar many of the Democratic candidates positions are on domestic policy. But what’s fascinating is how the toxic nature of the culture war tends to dissipate around Obama and intensifies around Hillary Clinton. I don’t think that’s necessarily Hillary Clinton’s fault. She is, whether she likes it or not, very emblematic of one side of the baby boomer divide. She gave that famous commencement address at Wellesley. Even though she is practically speaking, policy-wise, a pretty centrist, slightly left of center politician, she arouses hostility and animosity from the right of center and conservative elements in society precisely because she taps into that fault-line of the ‘60’s boomer war. He is the first person, I think, in national politics to actually move us past that debilitating debate.
TA: As a conservative, you’ve come to a fairly absolutist conclusion there. You write, Andrew Sullivan, “Obama and Obama alone offers the possibility of a truce in the culture wars.” What about him? Why?
AS: Well, I think partly it is his generation. What’s interesting is he is, strictly speaking, a boomer. I asked him: “Well, you’re a boomer, aren’t you? Why aren’t you part of this particular battle? Why don’t you raise all the same things that have been raised and dominated the race with Bush-Gore or with Bush-Kerry?” And he said, “I am a boomer, but I’m not. Because my mom was a boomer.” His mother, amazingly to me, was born five years earlier than Hillary Rodham Clinton. She actually had him when she was 18 years old. He is, in some ways, by running against Senator Clinton, he’s running against his mom. He’s running to actually turn the page in a generational moment. I think that’s in some ways why he is like JFK in 1960.
TA: But you’re surely not making the argument that it’s just his numerical age that makes him this transformational, turn-the-page candidate…
AS: …No, of course not! It helps to not have been a part of that struggle, not to identify with either part of it – which is simply when you were born and when you grew up. I think many people around 40 and below look at the kind of polarizing atmosphere of the boomer generation and don’t really buy into it. He’s the first candidate of either party – you can’t see one among the Republicans – who actually seems not to tap into that. That’s an incredible relief. We don’t immediately divide into red and blue when we look at this black man. That’s a really interesting phenomenon. And helpful if we believe this division is our problem. If you want American to start thinking constructively as a single country again as opposed to perpetuating this polarization.
TA: Laura Washington, Andrew Sullivan, a conservative, looks at Barack Obama and says in his final sentence [in his Atlantic essay], “We may, in fact, have finally found that bridge to the 21st century Bill Clinton told us about. It’s name is Barack Obama.” You’ve watched him for a long time. He definitely has an extraordinary background. In his person, in his thinking, do you see that singular, extraordinary bridge to the 21st century? Laura – is that too much for this one candidate?
Laura Washington: Oh, it’s pretty cosmic, I’ll tell you that! I think his bio, as has been pointed out before, is what makes him singular more than anything else. First of all, he’s an African-American that’s being taken seriously for the first time and is being pronounced by the powers that be as being someone who has the possibility of actually attaining the presidency. He’s biracial. He comes from a number of different places in the country. His father was an immigrant, from Africa of course. But he doesn’t come from just one particular locale. It’s hard to pin him down. He lived in Hawaii, he lived in the Midwest, he was educated on the east coast…
TA: … Lived in Muslim Indonesia!
LW: Absolutely. One of the bad raps on him is that he doesn’t have the right experience, traditional experience. In some ways, I think that’s what resonates with people – the fact that he was a community organizer and touts that very highly in terms of his skills and what it taught him about the world. He was a state legislator. He sort of skipped over a number of steps to get where he got to. Even as an African-American politician, he’s not coming out of the traditional base of African-American politics. He doesn’t have a preacher background, he doesn’t have a black political machine background. So those things make him compelling as a human being and as a person. You mentioned Obama’s conservative position, and I think that’s where you get into a little trouble here, because the devil, indeed, is going to be in the details. He is pretty much a progressive, slightly to the left politician politically. He takes positions that are, I think, slightly to the left. And when you’re looking beyond the whole baby boomer aspect of this, when you look at some of the traditional voting blocs in the country, when they start to look at him a little more closely, I think there is going to be some trepidation.
TA: James Traub … you’re saying that even among this foreign policy crowd that may not be very lefty, even when they consider him in that position … as the “leader of the free world” potentially, they’re for him. And surely that’s not dewy-eyed, progressive, left of anything!
JT: Do they get the willies in the middle of the night at the thought of this young, untested person being president? Maybe they do. And if they did, they sure as heck wouldn’t have told me! But I do think they have a sense that he is seasoned in a very different way from the way Hillary is seasoned. And you see that in his manner of thinking, which is kind of recursive, hesitant, complex, but not indecisive. I guess his proof is … you see it in the decisions he has come to. He has put an awful lot of weight on his prescience about Iraq. On the other hand, he was indeed right about the single most important decision that lawmakers had to make.
TA: And maybe they’re saying that the path we’re on just doesn’t work and this might be a path changer… Will is calling from North Carolina.
Will: I have a question about Obama’s stand, that he was raised as a Muslim in the Islamic world. What do think he’s views would be towards the American people of the country that he’s supposed to lead and toward the Arab nations around the world.
TA: … Of course he’s been right in the heart of a whole lot of Christian settings and raised in that vein as well. Andrew Sulllivan, what about the religious issue?
AS: I think it’s a fascinating and unexpected response from parts of the Republican right to actually use the name “Obama” and conflate it with “Osama,” which Romney did recently. And also to imply that Obama was somehow raised a Muslim. He wasn’t raised a Muslim. He was raised in a largely Muslim country and he did go to a school for a while, which was not a religious school. … one very small aspect of his identify. And what’s really fascinating about Obama to me is that he is actually a convert to Christianity from atheism. That makes him a very interesting character, as an act of choice and not as a born-again. He’s arrived at Christianity through a process of both revelation and a relationship with Jesus, as he puts it, but also intellectually. He is one of the first candidates, I think, in a long time to be able to articulate and defend Christianity from a really thorough intellectual as well as spiritual background. I think that in the world we now live in, in which religion is so polarizing that people are unable to really converse rationally about it – in which you have a revival of atheism and clearly a powerful fundamentalist strain in Christianity and Islam. Obama is, again, a very interesting combination, a very interesting bridge, a way in which we can actually come together again. That’s, I think, what’s important about him. It is his Christianity. The idea that he’s some sort of closet Muslim who’s going to betray this country is a meme that’s being spread on the web, that’s being used by some dark and rather nasty elements of the Republican right. I think Obama needs to be aware of it, especially in places like South Carolina.
TA: Laura Washington, you watched him live and work in Chicago for a long time. How do you see the religious side of this candidate, Barack Obama?
LW: Well, I think what he said is correct about the myths that are out there. One of the issues is that his middle name is Hussein. That’s something he’s proud of. He’s not run away from it. That’s another way for folks to demonize him and to spread misinformation. You’re right. He has come out of… he has a Christian background in terms of his current relationship with religion through the United Church of Christ, a very progressive black church on the south side of Chicago, which tends towards afrocentrism. And they have a lot of, I think, fairly inclusive, despite the fact that it’s also pegged as being “racist,” but it’s a very inclusive church, very progressive, involved in social justice issues. So that’s his orientation. His orientation is very much about putting his faith into action rather than wearing it on his sleeve. Which is very different from the evangelical tradition that we’ve seen George Bush come out of. Different from what you might see in other parts of the country.
TA: James Traub, that middle name, Hussein, you said that if it can play at home in America, you’re hearing foreign policy people saying it could have quite an interesting effect globally and maybe a very positive one…
JT: Let me speak to a slightly different thing, a political thing. I was very struck in the debate the other night that when the question of experience came up, Obama had the perfect opportunity to describe himself in precisely the terms that we’ve been describing him. And he didn’t. He said, “My experience is as a community organizer, I bring people together…” and so on. Which is fine – that is part of his experience. But it’s interesting that he shied away from the whole question of his hybridity, the fact that he has seen America in so many different ways and from so many different angles. Why? I assume it’s because of what Andrew was talking about, that there has been this very conscious – and I’m guessing so far very successful because I hear it so often! – attempt to describe him as not only “other” but “the enemy.” That is to say, there is a kind of classic American isolationist and provincial impulse which says, “ you either are a true blue all-American guy – i.e., George Bush – or you are “other.” And so he wants to occupy the space which says, “No, those categories are much too simplistic for the world we live in now. I am fully “us,” but I’m also some other thing. I think he must think it’s not political saleable…
TA: … Maybe. I have to say I see him as a kind of 21st century true blue American. But it’s interesting, in the Democratic primary battle, he’s not up against them, he’s up against Hillary. In that battle, in that context, doesn’t it look like a potential asset?
JT: It should be. But I think he’s afraid of it. Otherwise he would have been much more forthright about it.
LW: I think one of the reasons he’s afraid of it is because it is still an issue, particularly in the black base. This came up with Tiger Woods. Tiger Woods is not one of the most beloved figures in the African-American community because there’s a perception he ran away from his blackness and that he was never able to embrace that he was, at least in part, a black man. I think that Barack Obama is concern about that issue as well. He doesn’t want to appear that he is less than black somehow by saying that he is more than black.
TA: Let’s take a call from Iowa. There’s going to be a lot of action there soon! Cathy, you’re on the air.
Cathy: …Yes, I’m one of those [inaudible] everybody is talking about, spent a long time as a community organizer and political activist but very, very discouraged by the current state of our politics, including our Democratic leadership. I’ve had the opportunity, because I’m in Iowa, to meet with Barack Obama a couple of times. I’ve gotta tell you, it’s transformative experience to sit down with this man, to question him on the issues, and to take the measure of him. We’ve had a great opportunity here. I came away for the first time in many, many years hopeful that we actually have a person who can be elected, who should be elected, who will lead us to change, and who will be the kind of leader who can call us out to be better than we are.
TA: When you think about Obama vs. Hillary, how do you think that through? You’re on the front lines, there.
Cathy: I think it is a race here in Iowa between Obama and Hillary at this point. I think Hillary, for all of her access, represents the system as it has been. There will not be significant change in this country under a Hillary administration, especially in foreign policy. I think we drastically need to change. I think Obama represents our best hope for the kind of really fundamental change that we need politically.
TA: … James Traub, how about it? He’s got an amazing bio, an amazing way of looking at things. But whoever gets that Oval Office in January plus a year is going to face a lot of problems that are not going to be transformed over night. There are going to be familiar problems. Will Obama’s charisma, his background, his different angle on the world really change the way he might work?
JT: We have a particular way of electing people here. In a parliamentary system, you get somebody who’s spent a whole careeer dealing with a series of political and legislative problems because he has to climb to the top of his party before he gets to be the party’s candidate. We don’t do that here, of course. So we elect people who have a whole series of personal, emblematic, symbolic, characterological – whatever you want to call them – attributes. Like George Bush! George Bush is a powerful warning about the danger of electing somebody because you feel really good about him personally, but in fact he has very little experience of the world. It’s fair to ask, doesn’t Obama have that same problem? I think not because I think he’s a deeply serious person who has thought about a lot of these questions for a long, long time – long before he ever ran for office. I think he was just an intellectually serious person who cared about tough issues. He won’t be callow. Does he have the kind of educated intuitions – which is what, in the end, a leader depends on – that will make him, for example, able to make the right call in a tough situation? I don’t know. That’s the leap of faith that I think he’s asking people to take.
TA: Andrew Sullivan, you raised the question of …some potential fundamentalists in Pakistan or out in the world and they look at the US and suddenly they see, in the White House, Barack Hussein Obama. And maybe they and with them part of world opinion changes about this country?
AS: Well, I do think that’s an absolutely fundamental issue in this election. I don’t think many of us have absorbed fully what has happened to the reputation of the US across the world. And the reason for that is not to feel good about America. It’s for power reasons. Obviously in this war – and I think we are in a serious war against Islamist terrorism – we need both hard power and soft power. We need someone able to use the military wisely and well. But we also need much, much better PR, much better outreach especially to moderate Muslims in order to marginalize these extremists. Sadly, George Bush, for a whole variety of reasons, has actually poisoned the wells of America’s reputation and the notion of America actually being a force for good in the world. Many people, especially those we need to bring around to the West’s point of view, now believe the US is actually their enemy. Barack Hussein Obama, in himself, by simply a teenager in Lahore seeing this man elected, just the face, this multicultural, complex face of America – which is, I would argue, the real America! America is increasingly a very complex and very multicultural, multiracial society. That’s who America is! America isn’t George W. Bush or Rudy Giuliani anymore. It is much more like Barack Obama. I think that ability to win them over is important for winning the most important war that we’re fighting. In that sense, there’s the very strong national security argument for Obama. Just one other thing: I’ve asked this myself – can I trust this guy? How young is he? How jejune is he? How naïve is he? What is his temperament? I’m struck – I really am – by the maturity and calmness of this guy. Look at the last debate, where everybody was egging him to go for the kill on Clinton. All of them – his supporters, his friends. He refused. He isn’t easily pushed around by people. He has a very calm, small “c” conservative temperament. Even though his politics are to the left of center domestically (whatever that means anymore), he is temperamentally very calm and conservative and restrained. He’s not a hothead. I think people are not looking for a hothead right now. They’re looking for calmness and security in the White House.
TA: In some sense a kind of miracle culture that a candidate like this would be pushed to the fore at just this time. But is the American public ready for this candidate? Lets take a call from Eleby in Iowa:
Eleby: …I strongly do believe that Senator Barack Obama is well-qualified to help the US restore their national, civilized unity. And also to help the US restore trust in the nature of a certain leadership exercise.
TA: I hear an African accent in your voice, Eleby. Do think Barack in the White House would change America’s reputation in the world?
Eleby: Absolutely right! Remember, I’m telling you this: …[inaudible] All American presidents have been ignoring the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Africa, since all time. I see in Barack Obama the real new world leader…
TA: …That’s a thumbs up with an international perspective and we’re very glad to hear it! Another call from Litchfield, Connecticut – George.
George: I’m a liberal Democrat and I’ve been looking at all of the Democrats. …The face of America – as much as I detest the Bush administration – he’s had the most people of color in his administration and from a lot of ethnic groups.
TA: … There was Colin Powell. There was Condoleezza Rice…
George: That’s correct. The latest was the attorney general. I think Obama has gotten a real pass from the media. He gave one speech at the Democratic convention. He had three terms, I think, in the Illinois State Senate. Then all of a sudden he’s qualified to be president of the US.
TA: Do you think the more veteran people on that stage would make better presidents?
George: Yes, I do. And I think he didn’t have to vote on the resolution those other senators had to vote on in the climate that they voted on it. I’m against the war. I think those votes on the war were dastardly to our national position. And I sense a little bit of slickness in Obama’s campaign. He has to get specific. Who’s against hope?
TA: George, let’s pick it up. …Laura Washington, what about it? George says this guy is getting a pass from the media. What do you say?
LW: It’s no doubt that the media has been very kind to Barack Obama. Part of the reason is what we’ve been talking about for the past half hour – he’s a fascinating, interesting character. And I think there are folks out there that do – the issue of his slickness, or the whole issue of his message aside – there are some people who do have some legitimate hesitations, partly because he’s such a different person. Even aside from his lack of experience, if you see it that way, he is so different, he doesn’t look like what we expect our president to be. We are a multicultural country. But if you look at who’s in power, who’s in control of Washington, they don’t look like him and or folks we’re accustomed to seeing. That does create some discomfort.
TA: …Whether you’re with him or agin him, this is one of a kind and something special. …We spoke with Obama about a year ago, just before the midterm elections. In this little bit of tape from that interview, he addresses whether he believes it’s still possible for a candidate to speak from the heart, to speak with candor.
Barack Obama [recorded]: The question of whether the better angels of our nature, when it comes to our political system, can overcome darker impulses in our politics – I think the jury is still out. I believe that we can. But as many people have noted, in some ways I have not been tested in that fashion on the national stage. I’ll be testing it out over the next several years and will report back to you! [laughter] In terms of whether my head is bloodied but unbowed!
TA: Daniel is calling from Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Daniel: …I’ve been kind of depressed until recently. I’m a Democrat but like all the hullabaloo about how great all the candidates are but I’ve been depressed about the field. I’ve had problems with each candidate. And my biggest problem with Barack, I guess, like a lot of people is with the experience question. He seems young. Actually the person I was hoping for was Bloomberg. I think he’d be the best. I guess it’s not going to happen. But then last week you had a show and you had this fellow, Joe Klein, on…
TA: …Joe Klein, Time magazine columnist, yup…
Daniel: …He was talking about Obama and he kept making the point that Obama, like all the other candidates, is actually telling people things they don’t want to hear, that are hard to hear. For example, on global warming he’s saying we’re going to have to pay much higher fuel taxes. It’s going to hurt. That really impressed me. So even though he seems young, I guess this is the thing that’s impressing me. I was really delighted that he spoke of global warming. Because I think that’s by far the biggest issue of anything. I was concerned that he wouldn’t tackle that one…
TA: … So you see a flame of hope right there, and a kind of candor… Andrew Sullivan, how about it? Joe Klein writes this week in Time about Obama’s “quiet, unsolicited honesty,” and asks whether it can work in what he calls “our rude, noisy politics. He assumes a maturity in his audiences and in the press that simply may not exist.” What do you say, Andrew?
AS: Well, we’ll see, won’t we! I don’t want to sound too prissy about this. Joe and I always joked that we’re both in the same party – and it’s a pity it doesn’t exist! And one doesn’t want to be in the high-minded party that always loses! I understand that. But you know I also think the one fundamental thing about this election is that 74% think we’re on the wrong track. That’s Republicans and Democrats. There are two candidacies, I think, that have emerged that actually address the fundamental issue of change. One is Obama and the other is Ron Paul. Ron Paul is obviously a fringe candidate in many respects, but the enthusiasm…! The caller said he suddenly felt some hope. It’s an unusual thing to feel after the last six years. But you get the sense of actual hope with this guy and you do, also, with Ron Paul. Because they are prepared to challenge their own constituencies and they’re prepared to talk more broadly to everybody, including right and left, in a way that doesn’t seem too calculated. The trouble with Clinton, even though she’s an extraordinarily able person – obviously – is that she seems to be pure calculation. When you talk to Obama, you actually think, when you ask him a question, good lord, he’s actually thinking about the answer! He may actually say something that he thinks is the most reasonable response. I haven’t come across a politician like that in quite a while. Especially after the Bush era, it feels like exactly the right kind of shift in atmosphere.
TA: James Traub, should there be some kind of signal for the country at large that these foreign policy guys and gals you’re talking to look to this corner? They don’t want a [inaudible] there. But perhaps they see bigger challenges than the American people are fully alert to.
JT: Well, I think also, when you talk to them, they sound a lot like your caller from Iowa who said, “I just felt hopeful.” These sophisticated folks who work at the Brookings Institution and sof forth I think at bottom actually have a very direct feeling that causes them to join his candidacy which is the sense of hopefulness. Now they’re also clearly attracted by his qualities of mind. I think one of the issues that we’re kind of dancing around here is that he has in many ways – yes, it’s true that the press is quite enamored of him in maybe the ways the press was enamored with Adlai Stevenson in the 1950’s, which is to say a person of serious intelligence, intellectual integrity, someone who is not going to allow himself to be corrupted by the vulgarity of politics, etc. etc. And of course, Adlai Stevenson, a thoroughly noble gentleman, lost. Twice. So one of the difficulties for Obama is if you are going to be a politician in our system, you have to find a way of projecting publicly whatever good thing it is that you have inside you that gives people this sense of hope when they meet you privately. Or when they read your book or something. The political question – I thought it was posed during that debate but I’m not sure he succeeded in answering it – is can he find a way of manifesting this somewhat intangible and powerful, but difficult to pin down, thing in him?. Can he manifest it publicly and politically? The answer to that is not yet clear.
TA: It would seem to me that of anything he’s done or not done, manifesting something different is what he does! But at the same time, as you point out, he doesn’t look to – he may be young but he isn’t looking to idealists, exactly. His foreign policy icons are arch-realists. George Marshall. Dean Acheson. George Kennan.
JT: This goes to Andrew’s point also. Which is to say, if you try to think in traditional left-right terms – the terms we’ve inherited from the 1960’s – he doesn’t altogether make sense. You actually have to adopt different terms in order to make sense of him. This guy does not see this deadlock between pro and anti Vietnam, as Andrew points out, and the left and right in the classical sense. It’s perfectly natural for him to think of himself as a progressive and an idealist and at the same time be very much nourished by the thoughts of the 1950’s realist generation.
TA: Let’s take a call from Darrell in Wisconsin.
Darrell: Wisdom is what is really needed. Knowledge and information is totally apart from wisdom. Wisdom is knowing how to use knowledge in creative and constructive ways rather than in destructive ways. Everything that we know can either be used for extremely beneficial ways or it can be used – totally destroy our destiny and humanity.
TA: So what about Obama in just these terms?
Darrell: Well, …my website deals with these issues… If he would distinguish himself from Hillary. She still believes in war as a way to peace…
TA: Louise in Boston.
Louise: I’m a 22-year-old, pretty liberal voter in Massachusetts. I have found that… at first I was looking at Barack Obama. I do hear him sounding like change and he does definitely inspire something. But I find when I try and look deeper at concrete policy, he tends to get a little wishy-washy. Most of his answers, I feel like, tend to come off like “well we need change, what we really need is change.” That’s great but I guess I’m a little impatient at this point, after this administration, and I find myself looking more at Ron Paul. [laughs] I can’t imagine voting for a Republican, but I think I might because you can’t deny that he has conviction…
TA: …And he says it straight up and with fervor. But what an interesting testament to the way the political gameboard may be changing. Laura Washington, what about it? You can’t help but hear the call for change. Barack Obama embodies it. But Louise’s question is when he’s in power does he bring it on?
LW: Well, also, as the caller points out, when you begin to look below the surface, his policies and positions aren’t that different, as we’ve discussed earlier, from his opponents. When you also look beneath the surface and you start to analyze how, if he gets the White House, he’s going to have to get there. He’s not going to be able to get there, I don’t think, as a “change” candidate. Ultimately he’s going to have to raise hundreds of millions of dollars because he’s going to have to run a traditional campaign – because he’s going to have to buy millions of dollars in media, because he’s going to have to have the same-old same-old types of advisors around him. I think that’s going to start to make him look like the same-old same-old. The question is, can that “change” message overcome those realities.
TA: Andrew Sullivan: If he should clear the primary hurdles, do you see him becoming prisoner of the same-old same-old?
AS: Not really. I don’t think that just because you have a big organization and you do have a solid background in the technocrats of Washington it doesn’t mean you can’t articulate change. The number on issue is the war in Iraq. There is no other major candidate running who said that this war was a mistake and we shouldn’t have done it in the first place. That is a fundamental fact of his candidacy. Now I don’t think that any president will be able to get us out that quickly from Iraq. But I do know that the other vested parties in the region will be much more likely to negotiate in good faith with someone who was against it in the first place than someone who wasn’t. And I also think he’ll be better able to bring the country along and to be able to either persuade people that we do need to stay a while longer – because he has the credibility to do that – or have the mandate to get us out in a responsible way. This is a specific issue. It’s the most important issue. He has the most coherent response. And the clearest response apart from Ron Paul. And that’s why you hear this post-ideological movement to these two candidates which I find the most interesting elements of this. Most of it has happened at the elite level so far. Most of it is in fund-raising that you see this energy. And because a lot of people haven’t really focused yet on this election. My feeling is that his support will grow when more people understand what he represents.
TA: I don’t want to miss the heart of your essay, Andrew. You conclude saying, “Close up in this election, campaign Obama is unlikely. From a distance, he is necessary.” Necessary! That’s a big word! What do you mean?
AS: I think this country is in a very dangerous war. I think we’re about to get hit again. And I’m nervous about what happens after than happens. I’m nervous about a president who is so part of either/or red state/blue state America that he or she can’t bring the country together. I think we’re in a very, very dangerous time. Also constitutionally we’re in a very dangerous time. We need a president who can actually bring people together and who can also defend the Constitution under fire. That’s what he represents. I think there’s a question – a lot of us, even though we’re prepared to be open-minded, don’t trust Clinton, I’m afraid, and are terrified of Giuliani. Given those options, I think the country needs this man.
TA: You say “terrified of Giuliani” speaking, in your piece, as a conservative. Why?
AS: Because I’m an old-fashioned, constitutional conservative! One who believes that the legislature needs to check the executive and believes that there shouldn’t be complete overweaning executive power because I don’t believe the answer to all foreign policy is to bomb and invade. Which is the polarizing, bellicose position. Conservatism is not and has not traditionally been about fighting wars. It has been about bringing peace through trade, through open borders, through small government, through free markets. This tradition of conservatism is perfectly compatible with Obama. It is not compatible with the kind of extremism and authoritarianism that Giuliani and that wing of the current neo-conservative faction of the Republican party represents.
TA: One more call from South Carolina.
Patrick: I want to ask your guests… the caller before mentioned the issue of wisdom. I just want to know to what extent you think Barack’s views will not handicap him, that he’ll be old for his age and wise beyond his years in his thinking and his way of approaching problems.
TA: James Traub?
JT: Andrew talks a fair amount in his essay about the first book that Obama wrote, “Dreams of My Father,” which I also mention more briefly in the article I wrote. You cannot read that book without thinking this is a remarkable individual. Every book written by politicians effectively is the same. They’re really just a matter of different forms of marketing. This is not a work of marketing. This is a memoir written by a pensive, complicated and highly imperfect person with a real voice. The thing you aired with Obama before which had to do with “can I protect the reality of my own voice” – the fact that he’s asking himself that question I think probably helps tell you what the answer will be.
TA: Andrew says he’ll get us out of the culture wars. Do foreign policy people think he can really get us out of the global predicament we feel like we’re in sometimes?
JT: Andrew and I would probably disagree a little bit about the way you’d describe it. I don’t really see that these two symmetrically paralyzing forces of red and blue… I mean I think this has much more to do with the way in which Bush had highjacked this kind of culture war. I want to go back to Andrew’s point which is I do think he is someone who breaks certain kinds of very, very deep deadlocks in this country though I might not quite with Andrew what those deadlocks are. On race and on religion domestically, I think that is so. Globally, I do think his emblematic significance will matter a great deal. Because we live in a world where global public opinion is the medium in which we operate, even more than classic policy and diplomacy. We have to care a great deal about how we look to the world.
TA: Laura Washington, we’ve just got a few seconds: in your heart of hearts… do you think he can do it? Do you think he might just pull it out?
LW: I think he has a very good chance because of all the things we’ve talked about. But I think the big decision is going to come down not so much to the culture wars but to the war in Iraq and whetheror not… Yes, people are with him. They know that he’s right, that he was always right. But whether they are willing to trust someone with this level of experience -- with these few battle scars -- with that decision of what do we do about this war and with this very dangerous world we live in?
Additional links
Interview with Andrew Sullivan about his article on Obama
Joe Klein's Time article
Excerpts from a New Yorker interview with Obama
Ken Silverstein's portrait of Obama in Harper's