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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RetiredNow who wrote (24682)	6/25/2008 1:42:53 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 149317

Obama’s Detail Work By Chris Suellentrop Tags: Barack Obama “If Obama becomes president, he will have spent more time serving as a state legislator (eight years) than anyone who has occupied the White House since Abraham Lincoln,” writes Alan Ehrenhalt, the executive editor of Governing magazine, in Newsweek. He later adds, “[F]or a smart, curious and hard-working young legislator — for a Barack Obama in the Illinois Senate — can we be so sure that the skill set picked up over eight years in a state Capitol is inferior as presidential preparation to two decades in the pompous, cordoned-off environment of the U.S. Senate? I seriously doubt it.” Ehrenhalt explains: Twenty-first century U.S. senators are, virtually by the nature of the job, gadflies. They flit from one issue to another, generally developing little expertise on any of them; devote a large portion of their day to press conferences and other publicity opportunities; follow a daily schedule printed on a 3×5 card that a member of their staff has prepared; depend even more heavily on staff for detailed and time-consuming legislative negotiation that they are too busy to attend; and develop few close relationships with colleagues, nearly all of whom are as busy as they are. There are exceptions, of course — senators who beat the odds and develop an encyclopedic knowledge of topics that interest them — but they are the minority. I don’t doubt McCain’s instinct for global strategy, but a few months ago, when he had to be corrected on his statement that Iran was training Al Qaeda operatives, I wasn’t surprised at all. I’m surprised this doesn’t happen to senators more often. By contrast, what do state legislators do? At their worst, they are doggedly parochial, people who tend first and foremost to the interests of a relatively small constituency. At their best, they keep all the state’s significant issues in mind; it is possible to do that in a state legislature in a way that is not possible in Washington. During the years that Obama served in Springfield, 1997-2005, he was forced to wrestle with the minutiae of health-care policy, utility deregulation, transportation funding, school aid, and a host of other issues that are vitally important to America’s coming years, but that U.S. senators are usually able to dispose of with a quick once-over. State legislators have to do this largely on their own, without ubiquitous staff guidance, because staffing is not lavish even in the more professional state capitols. They enter into day-to-day bargaining relationships over the details of legislation with colleagues of both parties; there is no one else to do it for them. At the end of the session, they are likely to know the strengths and quirks of nearly everyone who serves in their chamber. And perhaps most important, there is simply more personal contact across the aisle than there is in Congress. Legislatures have grown more partisan in the past decade, as all of American politics has. But in most state capitols, the wall of partisan separation is nowhere near as high as it is in Washington. When Obama was in the Illinois Senate, he was obligated to sit down in a small room day after day with his Republican counterparts and work out the details of legislation expanding health-care coverage and revising campaign-finance law. He played in a regular poker game in which party and ideology were utterly irrelevant. Maybe there are still poker games in the U.S. Senate. I haven’t heard of one lately.