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July 9, 2008
Exclusive: The Burger King Candidate - Sen. Obama Wants to Have It His Way
Search the annals of American history. Scan through all of the national elections that have occurred since our inception as a nation. Now, try to find a presidential candidate, either successful in getting elected or unsuccessful, who had less experience than a few years in the Senate.
Once this research has been completed, attempt to locate and name a presidential contender, since our founding, who was the most "extreme" in his views (I say "his" because female politicking on the presidential level is a contemporary occurrence). By "extreme" I refer not to the revolutionary ideals of a Jefferson or Adams, but to the far outer-reaches of partisan philosophy. Who were the most liberal and conservative presidential candidates to ever have a serious chance at the presidency?
In short, identify the ideologues.
It would seem that such propositions would lead to a thorough debate amongst historians. Astonishingly, however, when looked at from this perspective, it seems more likely that the debate might be over a little quicker than anticipated. Namely, it is not a stretch of the imagination to submit that Sen. Barack Obama is both the least experienced and most Leftist individual ever to claim the presidential nomination of a major American political party (this includes parties which no longer exist, as well).
On its face, this is a startlingly surprising and sober realization. The fact that Mr. Obama is the clear front-runner, and at this time, the probable victor in November, only enhances the significance of the implications his election would have on the country.
Of course, experience in and of itself is not enough to make for a good leader. And inexperience, exclusively, is not enough to disqualify someone from pursuing higher office. Experience therefore ought to be categorized.
Wendell Willkie never held an elected office, but was nonetheless a successful businessman and executive for decades. Eisenhower had no political experience, but after saving Europe, the electorate trusted him. Lech Walesa had no executive experience, but after leading an underground dissident movement and liberating his homeland from Soviet tyranny, the Polish people viewed him as a sufficient leader. Albert Einstein had no real experience running a government, but regardless was offered the Israeli presidency during Israel's tumultuous birth.
But what is so remarkable about Sen. Obama's total lack of presidential criterion is how he has successfully used this rawness to his benefit. In conceding "experience" to his opponents - either Clinton or McCain - he is free to champion himself as the proverbial "Washington outsider," someone who has not belonged to the government that has "failed us" for "so many years," et cetera. By framing the issue as such, Sen. Obama has turned being an unqualified three-year novice into his advantage. He's one of us, you see. He feels our pain.
It is a narrative that will continue to work for him, so long as voters abide by the Obama standard and now look at decades of public service to one's own countrymen suspiciously rather than appreciatively. To paraphrase David Brooks, Obama's strategy is to succeed in politics by pretending to renounce politics. Experience is out, newness is in. Chic is the new wisdom. During the primaries, Bill Clinton phrased it well when he asked, "When was the last time we elected a president based on one year of service in the Senate?"
Perhaps being the least experienced presidential candidate in U.S. history wouldn't be such a big deal if such juvenility were not coupled with the single most party-loyal, philosophically partisan, and hard-Leftist candidate ever seriously considered by the American people - let alone nominated. The highly respected National Journal rates Sen. Obama as the "most liberal member" of the entire Senate. His voting record, on domestic and foreign issues, is as far-Left as it gets; he has voted along party lines 97% of the time. It is dispiriting to say - because I do not want to believe this - but viewing Sen. Obama's economic stances impartially leads one to believe he might be closer to Marx's Manifesto than Smith's Wealth of Nations.
All of this leaves us scratching our collective heads. Since when did Americans buy into Euro-trendy big-state socialism? Over the past 40 years, only two Democrats have been elected to the White House. The first one, Carter, was unceremoniously thrown out of office after a failed one-term stint, and the other, Clinton, never received a majority of votes. Both were good-ole'-boy Southerners; one paid lip service to capitalism, the other actually seemed to believe in it. Remember when President Clinton declared the "era of big government" over? Sen. Obama's economic platform, far from innovative and new, is a retreat back to the old, tired ideas of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society -- ideas so radical, and so conclusively discredited, that even "New Democrats" like President Clinton wouldn't touch them.
Obama's opposition to free trade agreements, his populist-unionist rhetoric, his nervous America-first protectionism, his big government tax-and-spend solutions, and inwards economic isolationism are far to the Left of free-trader Bill Clinton, and flirt with out-doing Jimmy Carter's statism. Think George McGovern without the experience.
And remember, this is the man that fancies himself as a post-partisan politician, a man who attracts so much support from independents and moderates because he makes them feel buoyant and cheerful about their day. Sen. Obama has been characterized as a Leftist-version of Reagan, an unbending optimist who makes Americans feel proud with his great communication skills, a transformative political figure that will usher in a new era of progressive liberalism.
Can we at least entertain the possibility that there just might be a disconnect between how Sen. Obama's charisma and persona subjectively make people feel, and how people might otherwise objectively view his economic, social, and foreign policies?
Over the course of the last few weeks, even Sen. Obama himself has begun to recognize this, and judging from his recent calculations, he too believes his overt Leftism might not hold in November. Thus the transfigurations on vital issues, like the new FISA bill for instance, which gives immunity to telecom companies for post-9/11 eavesdropping. Obama swore to Democratic primary voters he would oppose it, but to his general election target audience he swears to enforce it.
Obama promised liberal primary voters to take "the hammer" to Canada and Mexico and unilaterally withdraw from Bill Clinton's North American Free Trade Agreement. Today, with unbelievable insouciance, he calls that "overheated" rhetoric, supports NAFTA, and calls himself a free-trader. One wonders how those blue-collar Midwest primary voters - who voted for Obama because they are unemployed and he promised to bring their jobs home from overseas - are taking the recent news about his NAFTA reversal.
Last November, in a tough fight with Sen. Clinton to win over the liberal base, Obama assuaged the worries of anti-gun Democrats when he said he supported the District of Columbia's ban on handguns. Today, after the Supreme Court declared the ban unconstitutional, he declares he felt that way all along and supports the ruling - a position far more beneficial during the general election.
To MoveOn.org primary voters, Obama was in favor of negotiating with the Iranian, Syrian, North Korean, Cuban, and Venezuelan dictators without diplomatic preconditions. Today, to more serious general election voters, he is against it.
Once he realized he could get more campaign funds from private donors, Obama retracted his year-long pledge to take public financing. The pledge was dependent on whether or not his Republican opponent would also make the pledge (which McCain made, before Obama, and now, unlike Obama and to his utmost disadvantage, is sticking by his word and still going the public financing route).
Notice a pattern, here? The moment Team Obama considers it politically advantageous to "modify" his policy positions, they lunge for the jugular. On almost every major issue, Obama is moving to the center, which is leaving his liberal supporters puzzled. Is Obama the leader of a genuinely sincere progressive movement, or is he running to his Right simply to win over Right-leaning voters? (On that note, we are all awaiting the ACLU to protest Obama's new faith-based initiatives which out-Bush George Bush and would make the late Jerry Falwell proud.)
If you think these changes are benign or measly, harmless political posturing - the likes of which all politicians undertake - then saddle up for the looming Iraq "modification."
Suddenly, on Iraq, Mr. Change is changing his tune.
Sen. Obama opposed the troop-surge when it began in early 2007, said it would fail, and then declared he wanted all U.S. combat troops out of Iraq by March 31, 2008 (which now registers as months ago). In September 2007, Obama declared all U.S. troops should come home "not in six months or one year, but now." In November of that year he declared that, despite the dramatic decrease in violence and increase in security, Gen. Petraeus and his surge had failed because Iraqi leaders did not make sufficient political progress.
He promised Democrat primary voters to bring all U.S. troops home within 16 months, which was a promise he reaffirmed time and again, for months, as recently as this March when he stated he wanted to "remove one to two combat brigades each month." In May, during a tough primary fight with Sen. Clinton, Obama went a step further and swore that if he were elected, he would end the war in 2009 (supposedly dropping the 16-month figure to 12 or lower).
That was then, fighting for the nomination, with a Leftist base to please. What is Sen. Obama saying now? After taking Sen. McCain's advice and announcing he will make a trip to Iraq for the first time in two-and-a-half years - when Iraq was pre-Petraeus, pre-surge, pre-Maliki, etc. - Obama is now explaining to general election voters that he may "refine" his Iraq policy during his trip. It will be the first time Obama and Petraeus speak face-to-face, behind closed doors.
Obama, touting the trip as a congressional "fact-finding" mission, knows Petraeus will present him the charts, the statistics, and the empirical facts: violence down, cities and provinces pacified, al Qaeda nearly done, Iran hindered, Maliki empowered, U.S. casualties low, less civilian fatalities, insurgent and militia groups dismantled, improvements in the local police and national military, political progress in the central and local governments, widespread ethnic and tribal reconciliation, economic activity up, normalcy returning, and a hard won victory in sight.
Would any of this have happened had we not implemented the surge counterinsurgency strategy? What would have occurred had Sen. Obama received his wish in 2007 and all U.S. forces were precipitously withdrawn from Iraq - a few brigades a month - by March 2008? Where would al Qaeda have been standing right now? What would the region have looked like? What position would Iran have been in? What position would our country have been in?
Sen. Obama knows these are questions he did not have to answer during the Democrat primaries. Those voters didn't necessarily care; they wanted out, they wanted out now, and Obama told them what they wanted to hear. But Sen. Hope knows these are questions he will have to answer to the general public. Charles Krauthammer surmised it nicely in a recent article:
He hasn't even gone to Iraq and the flip is almost complete... And with that the Obama of the primaries, the Obama with last year's most liberal voting record in the Senate, will have disappeared into the collective memory hole.
Obama's strategy is obvious. The country is in deep malaise and eager for change. He and his party already have the advantage on economic and domestic issues. Obama, therefore, aims to clear the deck by moving rapidly to the center in those areas where he and his party are weakest, namely national security and the broader cultural issues. With these - and, most important, his war-losing Iraq policy - out of the way, the election will be decided on charisma and persona. In this corner: the young sleek cool hip elegant challenger. In the other corner: the old guy. No contest.
Indeed. But these reconfigurations are more than mere Kerry-like flip-flopping, because unlike John Kerry, the repercussions of Obama's policy switches speak not simply to Obama's policy views, but to what kind of politician he actually is.
Is he that transformative figure his supporters insist he is? Is he the mantle-carrier of liberal progressive ideals? Is he a man of conviction or expedience? Is he truly Reagan and Kennedy incarnate? Would Reagan have acted in such a way, rejecting the things he believed in to win over a different bloc of voters? Would Kennedy have indirectly admitted to the hollowness of his own ideas in the general election, as compared to their brilliance in the primaries?
It is the epitome of disingenuous to claim someone is a better, different kind of political figure, and then when he "does what politicians do" -to quote Obama's friend Rev. Jeremiah Wright -claim he is merely doing, well, what politicians do. His supporters, above all people, should inquire just who the real Barack Obama is -the far-Lftist Obama of the primaries, or the Obama of today?
For many of his supporters, it needn't matter. To them, he represents -no, he is -what Daniel Henniger termed the Hey Jude candidate; he takes a sad song and makes it all better. Ralph Peters calls this campaign rhetorical emptiness the Ferrari-without-an-engine phenomenon. But when looking at a general election map -whether on FISA, NAFTA, gun control, religion in the public square, diplomacy with terrorist states, public financing, Iraq, et. al. -Obama seems to want to have it both ways. He wants to have it his way.
How about the Burger King candidate?
Family Security Matters Contributing Editor Nicholas Guariglia is a polemic and essayist who writes on Islam and Middle Eastern geopolitics. He can be reached at nickguar@comcast.net.
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