For months I've been quietly hoping that Barack Obama would at least make a race of it with Hillary Clinton. So I was more than a little disappointed when all the metrics of conventional wisdom (in the wise and foolish senses) started showing Hillary leaving Obama in the dust and becoming the dominant frontrunner and presumptive nominee.
Folks who've been watching all this closer than I have, like Matt Yglesias, say part of the issue is that Obama just won't come out and say what his campaign is about. Says Matt, "Watching the primary campaign, it keeps seeming to me as if Barack Obama is making arguments that, while fairly clear to me, must go over the heads of at least half of political junkies, to say nothing of normal people going about their lives."
But the whole thing kind of crystallized for me this weekend when I was reading Maureen Dowd's review of Arthur Schlesinger's diaries in the Times. And, yes, it makes me wonder about myself too that I'm picking up political insights from Maureen Dowd. But here goes. It's her riff on Schlesinger's pained (or perhaps self-indulgent reflection) on his defection from Adlai Stevenson to Jack Kennedy ...
Kennedy has not been “consecrated by inner conviction,” he writes, adding, “I also believe him to be a devious, and if necessary, ruthless man.” But he suspects that his friend Lauren Bacall is right that Stevenson has “a political death wish.”
“The thought of power induces in Stevenson doubt, reluctance, even guilt,” he says. The diaries from the ’50s are an inadvertently hilarious record of the prissy Stevenson’s coy tango with his party. The year after Adlai loses to Ike, he has dinner with Truman, who urges him to take hold of the party. Adlai disingenuously demurs about a lack of qualifications. “Well, if a knucklehead like me can be a successful president,” Truman replies briskly, “I guess you can do it all right.”
But Stevenson is stuck on the same mental pedestal that Barack Obama is on — “split between his desire to win and his desire to live up to the noble image of himself.”
John Kennedy, by contrast, “takes power in his stride,” showing with the choice of Lyndon Johnson — unpalatable to Schlesinger and Bobby Kennedy — that he is “grasping the nettle.”
I don't know if she 'gets' Obama. But I think she's on to some of what's got his campaign stuck in second gear. And I think it's what Matt's talking about too. Obama isn't so much running for the nomination in the sense of reaching out and taking it. He's trying to show us how marvelous he is (and this isn't snark, he's really pretty marvelous) so that Democratic voters will recognize it and give him the nomination.
But that's not how it works in this country. I don't know if it really works otherwise anywhere else. But you have to really want it, come out and say it, take it. I thought about qualities that describe what is at issue. 'Toughness' seems to bound up in meta-national security mumbojumbo. 'Ruthlessness' sounds too, well, ruthless. You have to want it enough that you reach out and take it. Which isn't always pretty and admirable. But that's what it takes.
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/055434.php
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