The End of Obamamania?

The media honeymoon with Barack Obama is over, and while some of the rationales for nitpicking are absurd (he forgot which magazine he read when he was nine! Obama is making rookie mistakes!), others are pretty cogent, and I'm glad they're getting out of the way early.

While Greg Sargent is correct about the silliness of this AP hit piece on Obama, it's also true that there's a grain of truth here. Obama came to a scheduled forum on health care without anything resembling a coherent health care policy. It's comforting that he didn't try to spin that he actually had a plan, but it was an easy news peg for a media that wants to spin a story about Obama's style over substance. But this isn't entirely true. Here's Sargent:

But wait -- no policy speeches since the campaign started? What about this speech on March 21? What about this one on March 2? Those are both foreign policy speeches -- or doesn't that count?

Would it behoove Obama to go into more detail about his plans and policy prescriptions, and would it behoove him to do better on health care than he did over the weekend? Sure it would -- and his lack of experience is undoubtedly a valid topic. But taking things to the point where you're suggesting that the guy may have "little substance" on the strength of this stuff alone seems pretty damn thin. It's deeply superficial and stinks of the worst sort of slavishness to predetermined narratives -- today's being that Obama is a closet lightweight. Your Hack Pack at work, ladies and gentlemen.

Indeed, Obama took to the floor of the Senate yesterday to pass an amendment to the Iraq appropriation removing the red tape for returning veterans that has hampered their ability to receive quality health care. In fact, he's been in the lead on this issue ever since Walter Reed. So I don't buy the lightweight stuff. The media doesn't like to carry policy speeches, anyway, so they're essentially creating a sin of omission by refusing to cover the substance and then claiming there's no substance there.

But I do think that there are some traps here for the Obama campaign. His campaign theme is about creating a new kind of politics, and he's specifically eschewed policy prescriptions in favor of changing the system in Washington. There is a definite peril here, elucidated by Ron Brownstein in an excellent op-ed.

Obama's early support is following a pattern familiar from the campaigns of other brainy liberals with cool, detached personas and messages of political reform, from Eugene McCarthy in 1968 to Gary Hart in 1984 to Bill Bradley in 2000. Like those predecessors, Obama is running strong with well-educated voters but demonstrating much less support among those without college degrees [...]

Since the 1960s, Democratic nominating contests regularly have come down to a struggle between a candidate who draws support primarily from upscale, economically comfortable voters liberal on social and foreign policy issues, and a rival who relies mostly on downscale, financially strained voters drawn to populist economics and somewhat more conservative views on cultural and national security issues.

It's not much of an oversimplification to say that the blue-collar Democrats tend to see elections as an arena for defending their interests, and the upscale voters see them as an opportunity to affirm their values. Each group finds candidates who reflect those priorities

Brownstein terms this dichotomy "the warrior and the priest," and he plants Obama in the latter camp:

Obama's aides resist the collar, but in the early stages, he looks more like a priest. He's written two bestselling books. Like McCarthy, Hart and Howard Dean, he's ignited a brush fire on college campuses. His initial message revolves heavily around eloquent but somewhat amorphous promises of reform and civic renewal. He laments "the smallness of our politics … where power is always trumping principle."

Not only have priests — including Hart, Tsongas and Bradley — run better among voters with college degrees, they've tended to run well in the Northeast, the West Coast and portions of the upper Midwest where wine track voters congregate; the warriors usually thrive in interior states such as Ohio, Missouri or Tennessee, where college graduates constitute 40% or less of the Democratic electorate.

I agree that this is an oversimplification of Obama; he began as a community organizer, and so he can speak to the concerns of everyday people with a great degree of sincerity. But, as the president of the Wisconsin branch of the firefighter's union said in the article, "In my view, that's really not a message for our guys... They're really not afraid of politics."

You know, politics can be rough-and-tumble, but running against politics can be a familiar trope for failed campaigns. Ultimately the candidates who use politics as a way to affirm their values end up winning the game. Style vs. substance is something Obama can overcome. Warrior vs. priest? Maybe not.