Estrich is worried—and she knows whereof she speaks
Susan Estrich is worried that Obama’s lead in the polls isn’t what it should be at this point. Her opening gambit is pretty funny:
July polls don’t tell you who’s going to win in November. Just ask President Dukakis or President Gore, both of whom were well ahead in July and went on to lose in the fall (although Mr. Gore still doesn’t quite see it that way).
Estrich speaks with the (in her case gravelly) voice of experience. In her op-ed piece she refers to ex-Presidential hopeful Mike Dukakis as “my old candidate,” but what she leaves out is that she was his campaign manager in 1988. Perhaps she has PTSD from having watched his once-high poll ratings drop like a stone as the election drew near. If so, I wouldn’t blame her one bit.
Estrich describes the reasons Obama should be way ahead at this point, and I think she’s correct in her assessment. I hope she’s correct in her worry as well—and that’s not because I dislike her; I don’t. I just (as anyone who’s read this blog in the last few months knows) am singularly unimpressed by Obama’s capabilities to lead the nation in the right direction.
Estrich was a Hillary supporter. But now she’s thrown her lot in with Obama, with whom she has at least thing in common in addition to their political affiliation: she was the first female President of Harvard Law Review, and he the first African- American one. So perhaps that identification with Obama is part of what is clouding her vision and causing the puzzlement she expresses in her final paragraph about why Obama isn’t cleaning McCain’s clocks right now:
Is it that people still don’t know enough about [Obama]? No candidate in my lifetime has ever gotten better press coverage, more adoration from the media. Being attacked by Jesse Jackson is a gift of major proportions. Maybe it just hasn’t showed up yet in the numbers. Maybe race is a bigger factor than people want to admit. Maybe people just need to be convinced on the experience front. But whatever it is, Democrats should take note.
Well, take note Ms. Estrich: it’s because Obama is a man of little experience who has shown little wisdom or trustworthiness in the campaign. Perhaps campaign managers consider themselves to be PR geniuses who can sell anything, but how can people be “convinced on the experience front” when the experience simply isn’t there?
And while it may appear that we don’t know enough about Obama, we know much more than we used to (and perhaps all that he’s letting us know), and more and more people are either disliking what we know or distrusting what we know, or both.
No, Ms. Estrich, the problem is that Obama makes your old candidate Mike Dukakis look good. He was a politician with a past we could understand, and he seemed to have a few principles in which he believed. He may have been perceived as a wishy-washy liberal, but at least the American public felt they knew who he was.
Maybe we should know more about Obama right now but we don’t, and it’s not for lack of trying. What we do know is that he is a man whose true views are still opaque—and probably purposely so—no matter what his mellifluous rhetoric, whose ambition and arrogance appear phenomenal even for a politician, whose lack of experience is unprecedented, and who has held himself out to be a better kind of politician but whose campaign has demonstrated an almost breathtaking hypocrisy.
Could it be, Ms. Estrich, that the problem is that the Democrats have chosen poorly? I have a feeling that, as a Clinton supporter, in your heart you know I’m right. But as a good Democrat you just can’t say it.
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