Obama to launch campaign at site of Lincoln speech
Old capitol in Springfield, Ill., will be the backdrop for his 'politics of hope' kickoff.
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By Scott Shepard
WASHINGTON BUREAU
Saturday, February 10, 2007
WASHINGTON — Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois launches a historic presidential bid today with a campaign that promises a new brand of politics aimed at bridging the country's partisan and racial divisions.
To underscore the "politics of hope" he has been peddling for months, the man who wants to become the first African American president will announce his candidacy for the 2008 Democratic nomination at the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Ill., where Abraham Lincoln once warned his countrymen that "a house divided against itself cannot stand."
"It's wonderful imagery, and it underlines the fact that some voters see him as a fresh face who embodies the notion of hope," said Peter Brown, a political analyst and the assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.
"He's captured the public's imagination, but capturing their trust is the more important and more difficult undertaking. He needs to demonstrate that he's somebody they would trust sitting in the Oval Office, managing the economy and being commander in chief," Brown said.
That may be a lot to ask of a freshman U.S. senator, just two years into his term, still shy of his 46th birthday, with virtually no expertise in economics or foreign policy and no experience in the contact sport that presidential politics has become.
But the choice of Springfield for the campaign launch site also served as a subtle reminder that Obama spent eight years in the Illinois state Senate representing a Chicago-area district before his election to the U.S. Senate and that Lincoln, too, had only two years of experience in Congress before he was elected president of a country about to be torn apart by war.
"Look, I think that we've got to earn our stripes," Obama said in an interview published Wednesday by Politico.com. "I learned my politics in Chicago, a place not known for producing pushovers. If somebody goes at us, we'll respond. I am not averse to drawing sharp contrasts between myself and other candidates."
The interview was conducted just days after Obama's speech to party leaders at the winter meeting of the Democratic National Committee, a speech that was enthusiastically received but left some activists wondering if his healing approach to politics is a bit naive.
Rather than targeting his Democratic opponents or even Republicans in his remarks to the DNC, Obama took aim at a different enemy: cynicism.
"It's the cynicism that's born from decades of disappointment amplified by talk radio and 24-hour news cycle, reinforced by relentless pounding of negative ads that have become the staple of modern politics . . . that asks us to believe that our opponents are never just wrong, that they're bad; that our motives in politics can never be pure; that they're only driven by power and by greed," he said. "And if this is true, then politics is not a noble calling. It's a game, it's a blood sport with folks keeping score about who's up and who's down."
But what of policy? He barely mentioned it.
"He's a rock star and has used his celebrity status to jump into the first tier (of presidential candidates)," said Donna Brazile, who managed Al Gore's campaign for president in 2000.
"Now, it's time to transform those supporters into actual hard-core voters. It's one thing to draw a large crowd, but it's another to turn them into potential voters. So the greatest challenge now is for him to define himself." Brazile said.
And he must do so in ways that do not alienate white voters, said Ron Walters, a University of Maryland professor who was an adviser to the Rev. Jesse Jackson's two presidential campaigns. "He's not going to be able to champion any racially charged issues because that's going to begin to alienate him from the place where he arises in the electorate, which, is, uncommonly for a black candidate, at the center," Walters said.
Even so, "he is electric, and that should buy him months" in which to sort out the details of his proposals, said pollster John Zogby.
Obama will get the chance to make his case because the American public is ready to support an African American for president, said Scott Keeter, a researcher at the Pew Research Center in Washington who has studied polling data going back to 1958, the first year that the Gallup Poll asked Americans about their attitudes toward black politicians.
In 1958, a majority of 53 percent told Gallup they would not vote for a black candidate.
Today, it's between 3 percent and 6 percent.
sshepard@coxnews.com.
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