So far, Fox’s Sean Hannity and many of Barack Obama’s conservative critics have gone after the presumptive Democratic nominee for his “judgment” in surrounding himself throughout his career with such “radicals” as the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, former Weatherman Bill Ayres, and even Obama’s own wife, Michelle.
They’re on a fool’s errand. And, if the company he keeps continues to be the GOP’s principal criticism through to November, it will ensure Obama’s election.
Every candidate has vulnerable blind spots, especially one new to the national scene, so there are ways to run against Obama. But the current approach has a particularly fatal flaw: it’s untrue.
Say what you want about Obama, he’s no radical. Yes, he has an unusual name, but once upon a time, all of our names — whether Irish, Italian, or Hungarian — were considered uncommon. Despite his unfamiliar persona, his is a charming and conventional American success story — he grew up in a broken home, was raised by a relative, became chief editor of the Harvard Law Review (hardly the house organ for a bastion of bomb-throwers), and then spent most of his political career in the bowels of that well-known cauldron of Marxism: the Illinois state legislature.
Along the way, Obama clearly made the acquaintances of all kinds of folk — including Ayres and Wright, the latter of whom became one of his many spiritual mentors and has already damaged Obama’s candidacy all that he’s going to. But the pattern throughout his career indicates that Obama apparently cultivated these gentlemen — and undoubtedly many others — more for what they could do for him and his political career than for what he could do for them. And he has already disassociated himself from both Wright and Ayres, albeit clumsily.
Does that make him very ambitious? Yup. But if that were a disqualification, we could eliminate virtually every presidential hopeful in history, including John McCain.
Follow the flip-flop
So how could the GOP make an effective case against Obama? The same way almost every successful campaign has built a case against a relative neophyte in the past. The more experienced opponents of Barry Goldwater (in 1964), George McGovern (in 1972), and Walter Mondale (in 1984) each ran the same kind of ad, accusing their opponents of flip-flopping on issues. Those specific assaults, of course, embodied a much larger critique.
Flip-flop attacks aren’t really about the issues at hand. Instead, they’re a way of reminding voters, “You don’t really know this person well enough, do you?” Plus, they’re a great way to make a candidate who appears to be “above politics” look as political as everyone else. In that sense, they are really character attacks on the opponent, and the reason they reappear so often in presidential politics is that they are often highly effective.
For obvious reasons, Obama may be vulnerable to just such a thrust. He’s newer to the national scene than any candidate since Wendell Wilkie in 1940, and some voters are going to be uneasy because they’ve known him for so short a time. More than any candidate since Jimmy Carter, moreover, Obama is presenting himself as an anti-politician, promising to transcend the Zeitgeist of the era.
