Does Obama have the right stuff?
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By Jeff Zeleny
The New York Times
WASHINGTON — On a winter afternoon two years ago, Sen. Barack Obama took his oath of office and strolled across the Capitol grounds hand in hand with his wife and two daughters. At the time, a question from his 6-year-old sounded precocious. Now, it seems prescient.
"Are you going to try to be president?" Malia Obama asked her father. "Shouldn't you be the vice president first?"
Her innocent musings go straight to a threshold issue Obama faces as he edges closer to entering the presidential race: his limited experience in national politics.
But they only hint at a complex matrix of questions swirling around his prospective candidacy: Is he simply a first-term liberal Democrat long on charisma who is enjoying a brief moment of fame? Is he, as some of his more enthusiastic fans seem to think, the post-partisan, post-racial, post-baby-boom embodiment of a new brand of politics? Does he have the drive and discipline to survive a wide-open presidential campaign?
In other words: Is he for real?
"He's so incredibly skilled, but he's also had a lot of luck," said Abner Mikva, a White House chief counsel in the Clinton administration and a longtime friend of Obama's. "Hopefully, people don't think the media just puffed him up and he's a flash in the pan."
Even aides wonder if he can meet lofty expectations, which have elevated him beyond a politician's normal realm, thanks to his celebrity, ambition and biography.
While a campaign would highlight Obama's strengths as a lyrical communicator and personable campaigner, it also could expose the shortcomings of a 45-year-old politician not fully developed.
The next phase of his political development inevitably will draw intense and less flattering scrutiny, particularly if he goes head to head with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton for the party's presidential nomination. He already has spent considerable time explaining what he now calls a boneheaded mistake of entering a land deal with a Chicago operative who has been indicted on charges of influence peddling. His race — he is the son of a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya — could make his candidacy that much more complex.
Obama this month said he would make a decision in the next two weeks in Hawaii, his birthplace, where he is visiting relatives.
As he considers his future, aides are making preliminary plans to set up a presidential campaign based in Chicago, where Democratic contributors would provide a financial anchor to his candidacy. He has been convening private meetings with Mikva and other friends and political allies whose support would be essential, including Mayor Richard M. Daley.
Obama has sought to navigate the competing currents of celebrity and substance, initially fearful of being caricatured as a lightweight. While most Democrats do not question his aptitude for grasping foreign or domestic policy, it remains unclear whether an Obama candidacy would present a slate of new ideas or merely offer a fresh way of articulating familiar ideology.
"He brings to politics a desire to find common ground, which makes it impossible to predict exactly how he would line up on various people's litmus-test issues," said Laurence Tribe, a liberal Harvard Law School scholar who once employed Obama as a research assistant. "I think he comes at things in a way that is perpendicular to the usual left-right axis."
In the field of prospective Democratic hopefuls, Obama stands apart from Clinton largely because of his early and unwavering opposition to the Iraq war, a position he took while in the Illinois Legislature. Yet, as a senator, he did not deliver a major speech on the subject until he had been in office for 11 months. He now thinks the United States should begin reducing troop strength in three to five months, a position shared by several Democrats.
His potential candidacy is as much about who he is as about his legislative record.
Obama is not a product of the civil-rights movement but a beneficiary. He did not, for example, attend a black church until college. Yet his race as much as anything would make a presidential run historic.
As the third African-American senator since Reconstruction, Obama represents a new generation of black leaders connected neither by lineage nor by personal experience to the monumental struggle for racial equality.
His roots are traced directly to Africa, where a pilgrimage last summer helped burnish his credentials in the black community and provided a spark to his presidential ambition.
Obama pointedly has acknowledged that he benefits from his race, noting last year that a new white senator from Illinois would hardly have stirred comparable interest or intrigue. So Obama has embraced his role, but he has strived to be defined by more than color alone.
Earlier this month, on his first trip to New Hampshire, Obama tried to focus on substance, proclaiming himself "suspicious of the hype" surrounding his rapid ascent. Yet he failed to mention his role in stoking that hype, including appearing in a humorous spot the next day at the start of "Monday Night Football" on ESPN, designed to mimic the aura of a prime-time presidential address.
And in October, he dropped by "The Oprah Winfrey Show" for an hourlong chat. Winfrey, a close friend and loyal supporter, gently quizzed him on his presidential ambitions before asking, "Would you announce on this show?" With a smile, he replied: "I don't think I could say no to you," adding, "Oprah, you're my girl."
Before Congress adjourned this year, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., tapped him on the shoulder and declared, "Don't rush!"
When Obama first came to Washington, people close to him thought he might run for governor of Illinois in 2010, with the White House a far-away dream.
"I don't want to be driven into the decision simply because the opportunity is there," he said in New Hampshire, "but rather because I think I will serve the country well by running." |
