Barrack H. Obama

The great thing about Senator Obama is that when he speaks, we can often hear the noise of one man thinking. That is why the repeated attacks by conservative investigators and bloggers, to do with his extreme-left background, the politics of his parents and of his black mentor "Frank" - a notorious black Communist who had to flee Chicago in the fifties - and his relationship with unrepentant Weatherman William Ayres, simply do not stick. Even if they are factually true, most of us, supporters and not, instinctively feel that a man as thoughtful, as immediately open to argument, as capable of synthetizing and even improving upon an opponent's views, cannot be a fanatical left-winger. We all have met those, and we know that that is not the way they think or feel.

Indeed, sometimes he thinks too much. This comes out in what his opponents have defined as a habit of changing positions on specific issues; which is most often the result of having thought about them overnight. Think of his original reaction to the invasion of Georgia, and of the much more sensible position he adopted later. But it also comes out in areas where it would be much wiser not to do any thinking, and where his coherent adhesion to his own train of thought does little but hurt him politically.

I am thinking especially of abortion. In the field of abortion, hypocrisy is by far the more politically safe position. Whether you claim that you want abortion to be "safe, legal and rare" or whether you are one of those Republicans who seem to be always saying: "Lord, help me repeal Wade vs. Roe - but not yet", there is no reward in actually thinking on the issue and straying away from groupthink. Senator Obama has voted against every bill to restrict abortion in any way, including bills such as the Born Alive Infant Protection Bill. He is conscious that this is an unpopular position, which even many supporters of Wade vs.Roe cannot altogether countenance; he does not like to be forced to talk about it. But that is his position. His argument is simple: unless abortion is a right in every circumstance, it is not a right at all. Couldn't have put it better myself, Senator. Exactly right. On this matter, he and I are like those two litigants of which one said of the other - we agree on everything, your honour, except he says yes and I say no.

In this sort of issue one does feel Obama's roots in a narrow "progressive" political culture. The premise is that abortion is a right; that is where he starts from; everything else is a development. His occasional verbal infelicities, on which conservatives seize so happily, are also rooted in the kind of assumptions he lived in as a a child and as a young man. Take the notorious bit about "bitter bewildered people clinging to religion and guns". It is legitimate to ask whether he was even thinking, when he said that. He was among an assembly of San Francisco people - the kind of people he himself has risen from. He was there in order to gain their support and their confidence; This is the "dialect" they speak, this is the way they refer to red state voters when they are alone without recording equipment (which is most of the time). He spoke with the ease that people do when they are among their own circle; it is legitimate to ask whether he even really thought through his sentence. To me, it sounds more like a man slipping into the dialect of his youth when visiting relatives. Certainly it was not the only thing he had to say about Middle American voters, as he showed with a fluent and immediate recovery that managed to largely silence Republican attacks. It is significant that, apart from the occasional gag on some blog or other, conservative talk has not focused on this unhappy sentence, even though conservatives know perfectly well that this is the sort of thing that liberals say of them. Obama has managed to convince people, at the level of feeling more than of argument, that he is not the kind of person who seriously holds this sort of arrogant views: an amazing feat of electoral persuasion, carried out under enemy fire.

This sort of thing shows, as I said elsewhere, why Obama was promoted almost from his political cradle, why tough, grizzled old political operators from the city of Al Capone and the Daleys committed their own political capital to his success and promotion. It must have been like the old, fat, half-broken, scar-faced coach going to a small children's football match and suddenly being faced with the future David Beckham or Gianni Rivera. Politics was their job, the game they had played from their youth; and here was a man who showed every evidence of transcendent ability in the game. Like Abraham Lincoln silencing and convincing the whole Republican leadership - even those who had never heard of him - with the Cooper Union speech, talent, bright, luminous, unmistakeable, had stood up before them and taken hold of their hardened, cynical souls.

I would not worry about Obama's lack of experience. Talent has a way of rising at a speed that ordinary mortals do not imagine. Pitt the Elder was Prime Minister at 24, and succeeded. Napoleon was general at 24, army commander at 27, and (after a couple of coups, of course - something we would not impute to a Senator of the United States) Emperor at 34. Obama is in that rare and amazing area; even his opponents agree that he is the best public speaker in the USA in generations, and that oratorial ability is only a part of a much larger skill to address, convince and persuade, both one-on-one and with groups and crowds, which is the thing that political leaders need the most, and which he has to a superlative degree.

That being said, talent does not give him an automatic right to promotion. He will have to measure himself against a formidable opponent, and my view is that he will lose. He has two serious faults. The first is, exactly, the general assumption that he is made to win; which is not only wrong, but has created a most undesirable mindset among his supporters. The first to feel it have been the supporters of Hillary Clinton, often made to feel enemies in their own party for supporting a woman who honourably and legitimately sought the Presidency, as was her right to. The bitterness among the Hillary camp remains enormous, and rumours of an electoral strike and even a migration to Sarah Palin's camp continue to circulate. The same ill-advised expectation of inevitable victory has led the Senator to the ill-advised spectaculars of Berlin and Denver, staged as though Obama's greatness were a thing not to be demonstrated but to be assumed. Any evidence of swollen heads is grist to the mill of opponents.

His other problem is something which is also at the root of some of his greatest strength: his constant habit of tying up his own experiences with the experiences of his country and his people. His speeches always contain personal stories and anecdotes, always in close connetion with one of his policies. That is good: it grounds matters of policy in understandable and common concerns, and humanizes the leader and his concerns. But it also means that he is not good at separating his own personality from the issues, and at looking at them from the outside. Probably the dumbest and meanest thing he has done has been - more than once - to encourage his followers to complain to radio broadcasters and publishers, demanding - not a right of rebuttal - but the complete removal of interviews with or articles about people who oppose him, especially on the grounds of his background. Obama feels slandered; he is sure in himself that he is not the treacherous swine they make him out to be; and that is understandable. But that he should encourage his followers to ask for the removal of the offending interview is stupid and counter-productive; and a man of such intelligence should not need to be told.