younger voters will worship obama with all of their hearts.
younger voters will root out the evils of the elderly. can't have their experience screwing it up for the unseasoned amongst us.
younger voters will favor a new law that prohibits anyone from ataining age 31.
younger voters will live in a bubble and not realize that there is another world outside of their city of "hope"
younger voters will be thwarted by the one man who didn't buy into their idea of utopia.
LOGAN.
Run Logan, Run!
(these obama worshipers scare me. seriously.)
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An Obama-McCain electoral map makes these voters all the more important. As an Arizonan and a moderate on immigration, McCain complicates Democratic plans in the Southwest. Nor can Obama expect a surge of Hispanic votes in Florida, where the Democrats' chances aren't great in any case. That turns the focus back to where it usually is in presidential elections: the Electoral College Crescent around the Great Lakes region, from Minnesota and Wisconsin through Michigan and Ohio and on to Pennsylvania. That's where the Powder Shoot voters are: traditional on economic issues, culturally conservative.
As he reaches out, Obama will frame his reform message in economic, not cultural, terms. But the GOP will attack on that turf. In the primary season, Obama has faced little criticism for his liberal voting record in Illinois. That is about to change, as Republicans try to make Obama pay for his South Side Chicago roots, which produced votes in favor of handgun control and against the filtering of pornography on school and library computers, to cite two examples. It's not clear how much this will matter in the midst of a recession and an unpopular war, but the senator can't afford to assume that it won't.
If he is going to argue that elites have too much power—that he is the reformer to roust them from the corrupt temple—he needs to show that he isn't an elitist of a different but equally haughty sort. Carter never had that problem (and neither—Andover, Yale and Harvard notwithstanding—did George W. Bush). But it is an ironic measure of social progress in America that Obama—the law-professor product of prep school, Columbia and Harvard—does. There is a long American tradition of upper-crust reformers, including both presidents Roosevelt and many of the Founding Fathers. But most of them were either born with, or developed through long experience, a sure sense of the common man's argument on any issue.
Obama is still learning. He can be companionable, and is genuinely curious about people, but he can come off as a little lordly and self-regarding. The first-term senator is racing against time to steep himself in the country before he has to face it in its entirety in a general election. He jettisoned references to his favorite green tea and the local Whole Foods, but still seems out of place in a bowling alley or a mill-town tavern. He can seem a little clinical (or even, let's admit it, journalistic) about the wonderful "folks" he meets on the obscure byways that he hopes will lead to the Oval Office.
Far more important—and problematic—is the sense that Obama sees himself as too principled, earnest and thoughtful for the grubby game he must play to reform the country. He doesn't appear to relish being challenged, especially in public. He thinks of himself as a broad-minded guy, and, before he ran, he constructed shrewdly empathetic syntheses of issues, each designed to anticipate every argument in advance. But presidential campaigns aren't lived in advance.
In a nation built on the idea of argument, the object of reform is not to reach a point where everyone agrees—because no one ever does—but to ensure that everyone is heard. That was what the Founders where trying to achieve in 1787 when they locked themselves in the State House—a building that still stands, two blocks from last week's ABC debate site in Philadelphia.
And on at least one American Argument last week, Obama was listening to, and responding to, another side. The issue was gun control. The U.S. Supreme Court, the debate moderators noted, was reviewing the District of Columbia's handgun ban. What did Obama think? He answered as the constitutional-law professor he once was. Yes, he said, the Second Amendment did imply a personal, individual right to bear arms—a "general principle" that might make a total ban such as D.C.'s problematic. As it happens, that's the NRA's considered opinion, too. Obama's ruling wasn't as vivid and colorful—or as loud—as a photo op at an Indiana Powder Shoot. But it was an argument worth considering.
You can buy Howard Fineman's book, "The Thirteen American Arguments," here.
Adapted from The Thirteen American Arguments by Howard Fineman, to be published by Random House on April 22.
© 2008
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