Ego Trippin’

Obama can still win the Democratic nomination — but first, he has to get over himself

October 10, 2007 2:35:36 PM

All the stories chronicling the demise of the Barack Obama campaign are premature, no matter what the current polls say. He still has the same assets as when he announced in February to great optimism. And, in the months since, he’s raised a ton of cash and seen the rest of the challengers to Hillary Clinton fall mostly by the wayside. It looks as if he may get the one-on-one challenge he coveted sooner than he expected.

But it’s clear Obama’s campaign has stalled — and not because he’s shied away from attacking Clinton (that would be a huge mistake). Rather, his campaign has made a key strategic blunder that has, in turn, badly affected the candidate’s rhetoric — once considered one of his key assets.

As for that blunder, it first came to light in an April New York Times Magazine profile of Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod. Few, though, seemed to grasp its implication. Axelrod’s approach — and one has to assume Obama’s as well — is “rooted less in issues than in the particulars of his candidate’s life,” the author observed. “For [Axelrod], running campaigns hitched to personality rather than ideology is a way of reclaiming fleeting authenticity.”

That’s an interesting premise, with only one flaw. It rarely works in presidential politics, which is why Obama now finds himself in trouble.

Presidential campaigns are traditionally won by the candidate who can lay out a set of memorable themes that resonate with the electorate. By and large, biography doesn’t matter that much. Otherwise, voters never would have elected one-term Georgia governor Jimmy Carter to lead the nation in 1976, or, in fact, a one-term congressman named Lincoln in 1860. They both won because they offered voters a new direction, which didn’t have all that much to do with what they had or hadn’t done.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt to have a colorful biography out of which political themes can emerge. And character does count, and flows in part from one’s life story. But in the end, it’s not nearly enough to sustain a presidential campaign, even in the age of Oprah-esque self-disclosure. Bill Bradley had a great life story in 2000, and Bob Kerrey was the Obama of 1992, with the superstar bio and, supposedly, the rhetorical skills to match. Neither had much to offer in the way of new ideas or directions, though, and neither candidacy ever blossomed.

Unfortunately, the Obama campaign’s emphasis on a personal story (and it may have been exacerbated by the success of Obama’s autobiography) has set his rhetoric hurtling in exactly the wrong direction. Instead of showing voters where he’d lead them (as he did effectively in his 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote), Obama continually tells them how and why he’s the man to lead them. He mistakenly talks as if the election were mostly about him, not the country. Not only does this become boring rather quickly, but it’s also self-indulgent. Like a lot of lawyers and members of his generation, Obama’s speaking style can often be characterized as, “Well, enough about me — what do you think about me?”

All talk, no action
Obama isn’t the first American political figure to battle the “inexperienced” label. John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Thomas Jefferson, and even Christopher Columbus all were younger than Obama when they made their mark on the world. (Reminding voters of this fact occasionally wouldn’t be a bad idea.) The way they countered the charge was by demonstrating leadership, often through rhetoric. They didn’t respond to the accusation — they just demonstrated they were above it.

In contrast, here’s Obama recently on the stump:

“People have to feel comfortable that, ‘You know what? This guy can handle the job.’ It’s a stretch for them because I haven’t been on the national scene for long and haven’t gone through the conventional paths that we traditionally draw for our presidents, so they’ve got to stretch a little bit during a period where there’s a lot of stuff going on internationally, right?”

Can you imagine Jack Kennedy doing this? Earth to Obama: you’re running for commander-in-chief, not pundit-in-chief. Stop the self-analysis.

Even when he’s not soliloquizing, Obama rarely paints a picture of what he’d do. Instead, he tells us why he’s the man to do what he plans to do, which is bring about “change.” As we all know, Lincoln began his Gettysburg Address by saying:

“Four score and seven years ago, our forefathers brought forth on this continent a new nation — conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

If we translate that into the kind of prose recently favored by Obama, it might become:

“You know, I was thinking as I came over here how our forefathers would have wanted us to have a leader who, from time to time, reminded us of the values they held dear, like liberty and equality. And I’ve shown that I can do that, that I can bring about real change. I did it in the Illinois legislature when I brought Republicans and Democrats together and created change. And I would do it as president.”

The first speech provides a shared vision — the other is a vague notion, filtered through a résumé recitation. The first reveals a willingness to lead, regardless of the writer’s age — the other slouches toward narcissism.

It is one of the unfortunate aspects of modern presidential politics that you make your rookie mistakes in front of everyone. But we’re still in the proverbial pre-season. The truth is that Obama can still win. All he really has to do is stop talking about himself and start sharing with voters a unique and vibrant sense of the country and its future. If he does that, history has shown that the charges of inexperience will take care of themselves.

Racing notes
With Giuliani showing weakness in a key Iowa poll, Romney and Thompson move up.

On the Web
The Presidential Tote Board blog: //www.thephoenix.com/toteboard