Who Is The Real Barack Obama?
"People were satisfied," Barack Obama writes in his first memoir, Dreams From My Father, "so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves."
Such was Obama's strategy as a high-school student for dealing with white people who might be discomfited by a young black man. In the closing weeks of the campaign, Obama has hewed to this long-ago operating procedure. If "the economy, stupid" was the de facto slogan of Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign, "no sudden moves" could be the motto of Obama's.
After the Democratic primaries, Obama's challenge was connecting with working-class voters on their economic concerns. Could the dispassionate Obama rouse himself to do it? Could he overcome his exotic background and elitist vibe? Then, a stock market that lost almost 21 percent in value in seven days rendered the questions moot. The vertiginous drop sent every Republican candidate in the country reeling, and relieved Obama of the burden of connecting. Now, he only has to seem reassuring and nonthreatening. That he knows how to do.
The masterly execution of a political straddle is among Obama's many talents. His second book, The Audacity of Hope, is devoted to the craft. As Time magazine writer Joe Klein noted at the time, he "counted no fewer than 50 instances of excruciatingly judicious on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-handedness." So while the McCain campaign wants to revive the Obama of Dreams - an angry young man, lost until he finds a home in left-wing Chicago - Obama is presenting himself as the cautious candidate of the inaptly named Audacity.
Obama could have been prepped for the presidential debates by Shakespeare's Polonius, whose perfectly balanced advice to his son - "be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar," etc. - is weak-mindedness masquerading as wisdom. Obama repeatedly promised "fundamental change" in the second debate, but otherwise portrayed himself as the embodiment of moderation, nay, even a kind of conservatism. In his own telling, he wants to cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans, reduce spending, preserve but improve the current health-care system and win the war in Afghanistan while prudently drawing down troops in Iraq.
In the first debate, he said John McCain was "absolutely right" about the need for more government accountability, for fewer earmarks and for spending cuts, and about the success of the surge in reducing violence in Iraq and the danger of a nuclear Iran. At times, he seemed determined to be the first presidential candidate to win a debate on the basis of sheer agreeability.
The Democrats are on the verge of a strange victory. If Obama is elected, they will arguably have won the most left-wing government in American history. FDR and LBJ had raging Democratic majorities in Congress early in their presidencies, with which they forged massive increases in the size of government. But that was before the post-Vietnam culture revolution in the Democratic Party that produced a leftward lurch on social issues and a reflexive hostility to American power. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton also had Democratic majorities, but they both consistently ran as, and had records as, Southern moderates.
But no one can know whether Obama is the leftist his associations suggest, or the irenic uniter of his iconic 2004 convention speech; whether he's the down-the-line liberal who kowtowed to the base of his own party in the Democratic primaries, or the pragmatist who readjusted to the center as soon as enthralled liberals handed him the nomination. The consistent line running through his career is opportunism, a willingness to accommodate whoever - Bill Ayers or the swing voter in Ohio - can help him up the next rung in his ladder of ambition at any juncture.
When McCain asks, "Who is the real Barack Obama?" it is taken as a desperate smear. But it's a question even Democrats don't know how to answer. We'll find out with more certainty only if Obama is elected and has to make tough governing choices. Until then - no sudden moves.
By Rich Lowry
Reprinted with permission from National Review Online