Maybe it’s just little ‘ole me, but every time someone somewhere brings up Senator Obama’s “lack of experience” as a negative, four things inevitably occur to me.
First, even a skim-style review of the last 50 years of national politics reveals that the individual who, indisputably, had the most experience when he assumed the Presidency was Richard M. Nixon.
Second, I can’t recall a single national election during that 50-year period in which “experience” played in favor of the eventual victor …For Example: When that 2nd term Governor of a state where the Governor has little if any actual power and who lacked any other notable resume items (read: George W. Bush) defeated not one but two exceptionally well credentialed opponents (read: McCain and Gore) to become our current president.
I can however think of several examples of the more charismatic of two candidates emerging victorious. If anyone out there can think of a contrary example, I’d be happy to read it.
Third, other than Senator McCain and Vice Present Gore, none of the top-ranked 2008 hopefuls or talked-ups has all that much in the way of “experience either”. Warner was a one-term Governor of a state less populous than New York City. Romney is one term governor. John Edwards was a one term Senator. Wesley Clark has never held elective office or any governmental post outside of the military. Rudolph Giuliani was only the MAYOR of New York City.
O' and that still means Giuliani’s been the elected representative of more Americans than ANY of the current presumed contenders—other than Gore, Clinton and Obama.
Fourth, by far the most pressing concern facing the U.S. is a broken foreign policy ....and foreign policy simply does not emerge from individuals. It flows out of circles and or schools of thought. In other words … No one neo-conservative is responsible for Iraq, their school of thought is. No one RealPolitik purveyor (neither Kissinger or Brzezinski) is responsible for the paradigm that has caused us to regard the nuclear-proliferating, terrorism sponsoring despots of Pakistan as ¿allies? – the entire circle slash school is at fault.
But, how does that pertain to Senator Obama? Simple. The foreign policy types around him (Samantha Power et al) subscribe to the only school of thought that hasn’t been completely discredited by the last decade. So if you’ve realized that “we” need to kiss the neo-cons and the Kissinger / Brzezinski RealPolitik types a long overdue goodbye – Senator Obama becoming President Obama is the key.
The others will just offer us more of what we've already have far too much of.
UPDATE:
Just because I'm a fan of well formed thoughts in phrase ... I'd like to point out this editorial from TSPI:
"..The "wise men" of Washington, D.C., punditry have no business defining wisdom. Until recently, they performed as supine dorks backing the Bush administration's Iraq fiasco -- ignoring legitimate questions posed by dissenters like Obama."
5 comments:
Afghan leader blames Pakistan for instability
By Carlotta Gall
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan
In strikingly strong language, President Hamid Karzai warned Tuesday that a failure to bring peace to Afghanistan would destroy the whole region, and he laid blame squarely on neighboring Pakistan.
As if to underscore his warning, as Karzai arrived here, a suicide bomber blew himself up in the neighboring province of Helmand, narrowly missing the provincial governor but killing eight people in his office.
"Afghanistan either has to be fixed and be peaceful or the whole region will run into hell with us," Karzai told a small group of journalists during a visit to this southern city, his hometown, which has been reeling from almost daily suicide bombings in the last 10 days.
"It's not going to be like the past, that only we suffer. Those who cause us to suffer will burn in hell with us. And I hope NATO recognizes this."
Karzai said that elements of the Pakistani government were still supporting Islamic militants, as they had in the past, and that if such sources of terrorism were not defeated now, Afghans and international soldiers would continue to die.
"The state of Pakistan was supporting the Taliban, so we presume if there is still any Taliban, that they are still being supported by a state element," he said.
"In Afghanistan we are fighting the symptoms of terrorism, not the roots of it," he added. "We feel we should go to the sources of terrorism and fight it there, or we'll keep losing men, Afghan and international, in a vicious circle."
The charge that Pakistan is supporting extremists to destabilize Afghanistan is an old and contentious one between the two countries. The Pakistani intelligence agency has long used Islamic militant groups as a tool to put pressure on rival governments in Afghanistan and India.
The Pakistani government says it has ceased that support, though mounting evidence shows that hundreds of suicide bombers and other militants — from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia — are being recruited and trained in Pakistan's tribal areas, along the Afghan border. Allied Qaeda commanders are believed to be sheltering in the same area.
Karzai also criticized NATO for the behavior of some of its troops, who have fired on civilians in the aftermath of suicide bomb attacks on their convoys.
"After all, they are here to fight terrorism and bring protection to the Afghan people," Karzai said at a news conference earlier. "We are extremely worried, it hurts us, it hurts Afghan civilians. We are worried by it and NATO is also worried by it and we are working together to reduce such casualties."
This guy's blog crashed and was reborn sans this bit - so I thou't I'd post it here for prosterity ...
Time for a new generational voice in politics
Scripps Howard News Service
(Published: November 10, 2006)
(sh)- Barack Obama should run for president in 2008 for all the tactical reasons cited by pundits, but primarily because the baby boomers need serious competition from "below" on the vision thing. It's unhealthy to have so much of our political and strategic discourse dominated by the '60s generation.
Let me tell you why.
Morris Massey, an expert on conflict between generations, pioneered the argument that "what you are is where you were when ...," meaning all of us reach a point in life where we discover a world larger than ourselves. At that point, we become cognizant of the morals we've developed across our early years, and those morals - or worldview - tend to persist across our adult years.
For most people, that fateful transition occurs in the teenage years, which explains our tendency to stick with the popular music of those years throughout adulthood. Admit it ... you stayed cool enough across your 20s and maybe you faked it deep into your 30s, but then you woke up in your 40s and realized you absolutely hate your kids' music!
Don't worry. It happens to everyone.
So Massey's basic point is that our worldview is essentially formed by the time we hit college. Everything that came before is considered "normal," and much of what comes after is viewed as just plain "weird." Given enough grounding by parents and religion, most people hold on to their "normal" as they grow older, taking in stride the increasingly "weird," but eventually succumbing to nostalgia for the "good old days."
One trick I've learned as a foreign policy strategist is that whenever I encounter somebody with a clear position on something, I simply check out how that issue was playing out back when this person was a teenager. It usually matches up quite well.
Let me give you an example: talk to anybody about China today and you'll typically encounter first impressions formed in adolescence.
For those who came of age in the 1950s (think Korean War), China remains an aggressive communist regime that cannot be trusted, no matter how many stripes that tiger changes.
Fast forward to the '60s crowd and you'll find a lot of China-coming-apart-at-the-seams arguments, meaning the country's rapid rise likely triggers its internal collapse. Coming of age in the 1960s meant your dominant impressions of China consisted of widespread famine ("Eat your dinner! Kids in China are starving!") and the temporary insanity of Mao's Cultural Revolution.
It's really only when you start bumping into children of the '70s like me (born 1962) that you tend to find a more benign view of China's rise. Why? "Our" China has always been opening up to the outside world, starting with Richard Nixon's 1972 breakthrough trip.
So it's no surprise that my generation is the first to be so open to strategic partnership with China in global affairs. To us, that seems "normal."
You see where I'm going with this ....
Following World War II, American politics was dominated by that "greatest generation" for four decades (1952-1992, or from Eisenhower through Bush the Elder).
Following that long reign, the presidency basically skipped the '50s generation (e.g., Mondale, Dukakis) and moved right onto the '60s boomers (first Clinton, then Bush the Younger).
So with regard to China, we've basically moved beyond the reflexive hostility of the early Cold War crowd (now that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's gone) and into the persistent suspicions of aging boomers who still largely favor "containing" China and "hedging" against its rise.
Looking ahead to the prospective field of 2008 presidential candidates, we see it chock full of that '60s mindset, and that's just not good enough given our current strategic situation - namely, too many new enemies and not enough new friends. Iraq is not Vietnam, and the Long War against extremism is not a rerun of the Cold War against communism.
It's time for our debates on national security strategy to draw upon a worldview shaped more by the 1970s-an understanding of international affairs better in line with today's globalization paradigm (e.g., North-South conflicts, oil price shocks, transnational terrorism, global environmentalism).
Boomer politicians obviously care about these issues. I'm just saying how they frame possible solutions is reflected - and too often restricted - by "where they were when ...."
Senator Barack Obama (born 1961) could be the most-needed new voice for 2008.
Thomas P.M. Barnett is a visiting scholar at the University of Tennessee's Howard Baker Center and the senior managing director of Enterra Solutions LLC. Contact him at tom@thomaspmbarnett.com.
RUN, BARACK, RUN
By GEORGE F. WILL
December 14, 2006 -- NEW Hampshire was re cently brightened by the presence of Barack Obama, 45, who, calling the fuss about him "baffling," made his first trip in 45 years to that state, and not under duress. Because he is young, is just two years distant from a brief career as a state legislator and has negligible national-security experience, an Obama presidential candidacy could have a porcelain brittleness. But if he wants to be president - it will not be a moral failing if he decides that he does not, at least not now - this is the time for him to reach for the brass ring. There are four reasons why.
First, one can only be an intriguing novelty once. If he waits to run, the last half-century suggests that the wait could be for eight years (see reason four, below). In 2016, he will be only 55, but there will be many fresher faces.
Second, if you get the girl up on her tiptoes, you should kiss her. The electorate is on its tiptoes, because Obama has collaborated with the creation of a tsunami of excitement about him. He is nearing the point when a decision against running would brand him as a tease who ungallantly toyed with the electorate's affections.
Third, he has, in Hillary Clinton, the optimal opponent. The contrast is stark: He is soothing; she is not. Many Democrats who are desperate to win are queasy about depending on her. For a nation with jangled nerves, and repelled by political snarling, he offers a tone of sweet reasonableness.
What people see in him reveals more about them than about him. Some of his public utterances have the sponginess of Polonius' bromides for Laertes ("neither a borrower nor a lender be . . . to thine own self be true"). In 2005, the liberal Americans for Democratic Action and the AFL-CIO rated his voting record a perfect 100. The nonpartisan National Journal gave him a 82.5 liberalism rating, making him more liberal than Clinton (79.8).
He dutifully decries "ideological" politics, but just as dutifully conforms to most of liberalism's catechism, from "universal" health care, whatever that might mean, to combating global warming, whatever that might involve, and including the sacred injunction Thou Shalt Execrate Wal-Mart - an obligatory genuflection to organized labor.
The nation, which so far is oblivious to his orthodoxy, might not mind it if it is dispensed by someone with Obama's "Can't we all just get along?" manner. Ronald Reagan, after all, demonstrated the importance of congeniality to the selling of conservatism.
Fourth, the odds favor the Democratic nominee in 2008 because for 50 years it has been rare for a presidential nominee to extend his party's hold on the presidency beyond eight years. Nixon in 1960 came agonizingly close to doing so (he lost the popular vote by 118,574 - less than a vote per precinct - and a switch of 4,430 votes in Illinois and 24,129 in Texas would have elected him), but failed. As did Hubert Humphrey in 1968 (he lost by 510,314 out of 73,211,875 votes cast), Gerald Ford in 1976 (if 5,559 votes had switched in Ohio and 7,232 votes had switched in Mississippi, he would have won) and Al Gore in 2000 (537 Florida votes). Only the first President Bush, in 1988, succeeded, perhaps because the country desired a third term for the incumbent, which will not be the case in 2008. So the odds favor a Democrat winning in 2008 and, if he or she is re-elected, the Democrat nominated in 2016 losing.
Furthermore, remember the metrics of success that just two years ago caused conservatives to think the future was unfolding in their favor: Bush carried 97 of the 100 most rapidly growing counties; the center of the nation's population, now southwest of St. Louis, is moving south and west at a rate of two feet an hour; only two Democratic presidents have been elected in the last 38 years; in the 15 elections since World War II, only twice has a Democrat received 50 percent of the vote. Two years later, these facts do not seem so impressive.
In 2000 and 2004, Bush twice carried 29 states that now have 274 electoral votes; Gore and Kerry carried 18 that now have 248. Not much needs to change in politics in order for a lot to change in governance. And Obama, like the rest of us, has been warned, by William Butler Yeats: All life is a preparation for something that probably will never happen.
Unless you make it happen.
georgewill@washpost.com
Here's another Run Barack run piece for your collection boyo:
RUN, BARACK, RUN' BY DAVID BROOKS
Barack Obama should run for president.
He should run first for the good of his party. It would demoralize the Democrats to go through a long primary season with the most exciting figure in the party looming off in the distance like some unapproachable dream. The next Democratic nominee should either be Barack Obama or should have the stature that would come from defeating Barack Obama.
Second, he should run because of his age. Obama’s inexperience is his most obvious shortcoming. Over the next four years, the world could face a genocidal civil war in Iraq, a wave of nuclear proliferation, more Islamic extremism and a demagogues’ revolt against globalization. Do we really want a forty-something in the White House?
And yet in his new book, “The Audacity of Hope,” Obama makes a strong counterargument. He notes that it’s time to move beyond the political style of the baby boom generation. This is a style, he said in an interview late Tuesday, that is highly moralistic and personal, dividing people between who is good and who is bad.
Obama himself has a mentality formed by globalization, not the S.D.S. With his multiethnic family and his globe-spanning childhood, there is a little piece of everything in Obama. He is perpetually engaged in an internal discussion between different pieces of his hybrid self — Kenya with Harvard, Kansas with the South Side of Chicago — and he takes that conversation outward into the world.
“Politics, like science, depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality,” he writes in his book. He distrusts righteous anger and zeal. He does not demonize his opponents and tells audiences that he does not think George Bush is a bad man.
He has a compulsive tendency to see both sides of any issue. Joe Klein of Time counted 50 instances of extremely judicious on-the-one-hand-on the-other-hand formulations in the book. He seems like the guy who spends his first 15 minutes at a restaurant debating the relative merits of fish versus meat.
And yet this style is surely the antidote to the politics of the past several years. It is surely true that a president who brings a deliberative style to the White House will multiply his knowledge, not divide it.
During our talk, I reminded Obama that at some level politics is about power, not conversation. He pointed out that he’d risen from nothing to national prominence in a few years so he knew something about acquiring power, but he kept returning to his mode, which is conversation, deliberation and reconciliation.
The third reason Obama should run for president is his worldview. At least in the way he conceptualizes the world, he is not an orthodox liberal. In the book, he harks back to a Hamiltonian tradition that calls not for big government, but for limited yet energetic government to enhance social mobility. The contemporary guru he cites most is Warren Buffett.
He has interesting things to say about the way culture and economics intertwine to create urban poverty. He, conceptually, welcomes free trade and thinks the U.S. may have no choice but to improvise and slog it out in Iraq.
The chief problem in his book is that after launching off on some interesting description of a problem, he will settle back, when it comes time to make a policy suggestion, into a familiar and small-bore Democratic proposal. I’d give him an A for conception but a B-minus for policy creativity.
Obama, who is nothing if not honest about himself, is aware of the problem, and has various explanations for it. And what matters at this point is not his platform, but the play of his mind. He is one of those progressives, like Gordon Brown in Britain, who is thinking about the challenges of globalization outside the normal clichés.
Coming from my own perspective, I should note that I disagree with many of Obama’s notions and could well end up agreeing more with one of his opponents. But anyone who’s observed him closely can see that Obama is a new kind of politician. As Klein once observed, he’s that rarest of creatures: a megahyped phenomenon that lives up to the hype.
It may not be personally convenient for him, but the times will never again so completely require the gifts that he possesses. Whether you’re liberal or conservative, you should hope Barack Obama runs for president.
Run, Barack, Run
Jack Beatty falls under the spell of a "political talent of a rare order"
.....
I n late September former Virginia Governor Mark Warner, billed as the "Un-Hillary" in a New York Times Magazine profile, was among the putative Democratic candidates to speak at Senator Tom Harkin’s annual "Steak Fry" held on the Warren County Fairgrounds in Indianola, Iowa. In October, Warner withdrew from the race. Two weekends ago Indiana Senator Evan Bayh, another likely Democratic contender for 2008, was one of two Democrats campaigning in New Hampshire. He nearly filled a living room in the small Upper Connecticut valley town of Cornish. On Saturday Bayh announced that he would not be running for president in ’08.
From the archives:
"The Natural" (September 2004)
Why is Barack Obama generating more excitement among Democrats than John Kerry? By Ryan Lizza
Warner said he was withdrawing from contention because he did not want his three young children to grow up in the White House nor be known for the rest of their lives as the "president’s daughters." No doubt he was being sincere. But his decision must also have been influenced by what he saw at the steak fry: Barack Obama in action, addressing a rapturous crowd to tumultuous applause, and then plunging into a sea of Iowans to shake hands, sign books, notebooks, and shirt-cuffs, pose in family pictures, and listen to the voices urging, "Run, Barack, run." Warner could not compete with that.
As for Evan Bayh, he was glimpsed Sunday morning sitting with two people in a Manchester coffee shop while Obama was drawing 900 to a book signing in Portsmouth. That afternoon, Obama spoke to 1,500 cheering Democrats in a Manchester hotel.Introducing the tall, lithe, handsome, deep-voiced, 45-year-old Obama to a crowd that had paid $25 a head to celebrate the party’s victories in the November elections, New Hampshire Governor John Lynch joked that the state Democratic committee had originally invited the Rolling Stones—but at the last minute decided that Obama would sell more tickets. "I have never seen anything like this in my 40 years of being active in politics," Jack Buckley, former mayor of Dover, gushed to the Boston Globe’s Scott Lehigh. "If I were Hillary, I would be more than a little concerned." Bayh was so concerned he quit the race.
Along with my wife, son, and some friends, I was part of that Manchester crowd. What we saw was political talent of a rare order. Presidential politics turn on personality, not "issues." Like an actor, a candidate must display qualities admired by the voters. The hardest quality to put across—and the most important—is authenticity. It’s impossible to define a priori, but you know authenticity when you see it. We saw it in Obama. In his ease with himself, the even timbre of his voice,his unhurried cadences, his graceful, un-theatrical gestures, and his avoidance of rhetoric (that age-old political device that Yeats described as “the will trying to do the work of the imagination”); and, notably, in his freedom from boasting and ritualized modesty—he knew who he was. His speech was a plea for a bipartisan, non-ideological, all-American politics of remedy. It delivered a shorthand version of the case developed at length in his new book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, a lucid meditation on the gap between our cheapened politics and grim challenges.
The two are related: Politics kill hope that the challenges can be met. Obama understands that hopelessness. A community organizer in a poor Chicago neighborhood whose people have endured "a generation of broken promises," he encountered it, well-defended by cynicism, when he first ran for the Illinois state legislature. But as he reminded the voters then and his readers now—there is "another tradition to politics, a tradition that stretched from the days of the country’s founding to the glory of the civil rights movement, a tradition based on the simple idea that we have a stake in one another, and that what binds us together is greater than what drives us apart, and that if enough people believe in the truth of that proposition and act on it, then we might not solve every problem, but we can get something meaningful done.” He concedes that to believe in the possibilities of politics today takes "audacity of hope"—yes, and an almost willful blindness to the civic implications of our sound-bitten, swift-boated, dumbed-down, money-driven electioneering.
From the archives:
"Take Two" (November 2006)
How Hillary Clinton turned herself into the consummate Washington player. By Joshua Green
In a recent Chicago Tribune interview, Obama said he had no interest in being cast as the "un-Hillary." Nevertheless, that is how he will be cast if, as seems more and more likely, he runs. The contrasts are all in Obama’s favor, it seems to me. Obama writes his own books; Hillary hired a ghostwriter to write her best-selling memoir but neglected to mention it in her acknowledgements. Her speeches are purees of her handler’s words and ideas, and sound it. If Hillary’s last name were Rodham, she would not be in the Senate, much less be considered presidential timber. Her celebrity, like her name, is on loan from her husband. If Barack Obama were Joe Smith, he would be right where he is—indeed, cleft of his exotic name, he might make a stronger showing in the polls. He is a self-made political entrepreneur who has advanced on talent—his ease in communicating his ideas, his empathy not only for people in trouble but for those, like conservative evangelical Christians and Republican politicians, who disagree with him—and what Madison Avenue might call his "Q-rating," or un-analyzable likeability. While not an exciting speaker, Obama is an enthralling one. As she showed in her speech at the memorial service for Coretta Scott King, Hillary Clinton is a boring, flat-voiced, false-gesturing platform speaker. She shouts into the microphone; Obama talks into it. Her borrowed words inspire no trust – they remind us of her borrowed foundation – and her clenched personality inspires little affection. Money can’t buy her love, nor buzz protect her political glass jaw. The question for Democrats is, Who will break it first? Will it be one of her Democratic challengers—Obama, Joe Biden, John Edwards—or John McCain?
The knock on Obama is that, with only two years in the U.S. Senate, he lacks the experience to be president. Asked about that by the Tribune, he sensibly replied: "That experience question would be answered at the end of the campaign…. The test of leadership in my mind is not going to be what’s on a paper resumé." Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld "had the best resumé on paper of any foreign policy team, and the result has been what I consider to be one of the biggest foreign policy mistakes in our history." Joe Biden had decades of experience in foreign policy, yet voted for that mistake. So did John Kerry, John Edwards, and Hillary Clinton.
And Barack Obama? Addressing an antiwar rally in Chicago in the fall of 2002, the then-Illinois state Senator said he was not opposed to all war; his grandfather had "fought in Patton’s army," and "after witnessing the carnage and destruction" of September 11th he said he "would willingly take up arms myself to prevent such a tragedy from happening again." What he could not support was "a dumb war, a rash war, a war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics." Then came a moment of historic prescience:
I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than the best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Qaeda.
On the foreign policy issue of our time, Barack Obama was right, and Hillary Clinton et. al. wrong. Asked by the Tribune editors how he thought the Republicans would run against him, he winningly sallied, "War hero against snot-nosed kid." But the kid was right, not the war hero John McCain—which is a sufficient defense against GOP condescension, and an irrefutable example of Obama’s sound judgment. That, more than experience, is what’s wanted in a president. And like charisma, you have it or you don’t. Barack Obama has both; Hillary Clinton (vide, her politically tin-eared plan for universal health insurance), neither. Run, Barack, run.
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