How Obama Fell to Earth
Back in Iowa, Barack Obama promised to be something new — an
unconventional leader who would confront unpleasant truths, embrace
novel policies and unify the country. If he had knocked Hillary Clinton
out in New Hampshire and entered general-election mode early, this
enormously thoughtful man would have become that.
David Brooks
But he did not knock her
out, and the aura around Obama has changed. Furiously courting
Democratic primary voters and apparently exhausted, Obama has emerged
as a more conventional politician and a more orthodox liberal.
He sprinkled his debate performance Wednesday night with the sorts of
fibs, evasions and hypocrisies that are the stuff of conventional
politics. He claimed falsely that his handwriting wasn’t on a
questionnaire about gun control. He claimed that he had never attacked
Clinton for her exaggerations about the Tuzla airport, though his
campaign was all over it. Obama piously condemned the practice of
lifting other candidates’ words out of context, but he has been doing
exactly the same thing to John McCain, especially over his 100 years in
Iraq comment.
Obama also made a pair of grand and cynical promises that are the
sign of someone who is thinking more about campaigning than governing.
He made a sweeping read-my-lips pledge never to raise taxes on anybody
making less than $200,000 to $250,000 a year. That will make it
impossible to address entitlement reform any time in an Obama
presidency. It will also make it much harder to afford the vast array
of middle-class tax breaks, health care reforms and energy policy
Manhattan Projects that he promises to deliver.
Then he made
an iron vow to get American troops out of Iraq within 16 months.
Neither Obama nor anyone else has any clue what the conditions will be
like when the next president takes office. He could have responsibly
said that he aims to bring the troops home but will make a judgment at
the time. Instead, he rigidly locked himself into a policy that will
not be fully implemented for another three years.
If Obama is
elected, he will either go back on this pledge — in which case he would
destroy his credibility — or he will risk genocide in the region and a
viciously polarizing political war at home.
Then there are the
cultural issues. Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos of ABC News
are taking a lot of heat for spending so much time asking about
Jeremiah Wright and the “bitter” comments. But the fact is that voters
want a president who basically shares their values and life
experiences. Fairly or not, they look at symbols like Michael Dukakis
in a tank, John Kerry’s windsurfing or John Edwards’s haircut as clues
about shared values.
When Obama began this ride, he seemed like
a transcendent figure who could understand a wide variety of life
experiences. But over the past months, things have happened that make
him seem more like my old neighbors in Hyde Park in Chicago.
Some of us love Hyde Park for its diversity and quirkiness, as there
are those who love Cambridge and Berkeley. But it is among the more
academic and liberal places around. When Obama goes to a church infused
with James Cone-style liberation theology, when he makes ill-informed
comments about working-class voters, when he bowls a 37 for crying out
loud, voters are going to wonder if he’s one of them. Obama has to
address those doubts, and he has done so poorly up to now.
It
was inevitable that the period of “Yes We Can!” deification would come
to an end. It was not inevitable that Obama would now look so
vulnerable. He’ll win the nomination, but in a matchup against John
McCain, he is behind in Florida, Missouri and Ohio, and merely tied in
must-win states like Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
A generic Democrat now beats a generic Republican by 13 points, but
Obama is trailing his own party. One in five Democrats say they would
vote for McCain over Obama.
General election voters are
different from primary voters. Among them, Obama is lagging among
seniors and men. Instead of winning over white high school-educated
voters who are tired of Bush and conventional politics, he does worse
than previous nominees. John Judis and Ruy Teixeira have estimated a
Democrat has to win 45 percent of such voters to take the White House.
I’ve asked several of the most skillful Democratic politicians over the
past few weeks, and they all think that’s going to be hard.
A
few months ago, Obama was riding his talents. Clinton has ground him
down, and we are now facing an interesting phenomenon. Republicans have
long assumed they would lose because of the economy and the sad state
of their party. Now, Democrats are deeply worried their nominee will
lose in November.
Welcome to 2008. Everybody’s miserable.
