Obama for President

I've been supporting Barack Obama for President for some time, but now that he won the Iowa Caucuses and more people are starting to take notice of his candidacy, I figured it was time to explain why I picked him.

Feel free to ignore my opinion. You might think I'm what communication theorists call "an opinion leader," or you might think I'm what average people might call a communication theorist ("pompous blowhard.")

But I will say up front that my six years working as a congressional aide has strongly influenced what I think about this race. Not because I have such intimate knowledge of the candidates -- I talked to Hillary Clinton on the phone once (she was very nice) and her spokesman was my boss during my brief stint in Senator Schumer's office. One of Barack Obama's staffers and I share an odd coincidence -- we made up consecutive firings from the Schumer office and then both went on to work on chemical security as one of our issues. And I know Dennis Kucinich's environment staffer pretty well.

Other than those obviously paltry connections, my knowledge is about what any other halfhearted political junkie might now. What is unique about my background is that I got an intimate look at how Washington works. Or doesn't, if you want to be a cynic. Or doesn't because it isn't supposed to, if you want to be all philosophical about it.

Let me give you some idea of what I'm talking about. For most of the time I worked on "the Hill," us Democrats were in the minority as the Republicans ran the show. That meant that my job was simple -- to cause trouble. In general, I wasn't trying to solve the big public policy challenges of the day. I was instead trying to help the various members of Congress I worked for make the case that the guys in charge, the Republicans and President Bush, were "a bunch of bums," as one of my bosses would have put it. If we can prove to enough Americans that our opposition was no good, then we could win elections and start making policy. Lo and behold, in 2006 we did just that.

But while Democratic control of Congress made a big difference in my opinion, it left a great deal unchanged. Washington is still a city where politics is just a game to be played by young, clueless folks like myself who are really good at writing intelligent talking points and by crusty old lobbyists who get paid gobs of money to know just a little more than I did, forcing me to consider seeing the world from their clients' eyes. Congressmen generally did what made them look good and made their party look good. And why shouldn't they? That's their job.

What was lacking was real leadership. This isn't something that comes from Congress. Say what you want about Nancy Pelosi or others, but they're really just the titular heads of a rollicking body of people trying to sort out the nation's various interests. Leadership, in terms of changing the direction of the nation and the world, comes from only one place -- the presidency.

This isn't the place for a rather obvious diatribe against President Bush, but the point here is that he and his Administration were sorely lacking in leadership. They kowtowed to their favorite interests, played partisan games, and generally made the atmosphere in Washington worse. More partisanship. More lobbyist influence. Less desire to work together, and less consideration of a wide range of public input.

So the question becomes, who has the ability to change the way business is done? How to end eight years of games and make politics into a serious tool for improving the lives of Americans and people all over the world?

Let me first say that I generally shy away from candidates without a realistic chance of winning the nomination. Bill Richardson, you're funny and smart, but people still have no idea who the hell you are. Sorry.

I turned my attention to Obama not only after his 2004 convention speech, when everyone first noticed him, but also after seeing him speak at a 2006 rally in New Jersey. His charisma and personality were incredible. I've watched countless politicians speak, and many of them are impressively articulate. But few are able to actually describe a vision and bring the energy that makes people believe the vision will actually come to pass.

And he inspired me. Let me tell you, I am a political burnout. I started out idealistic when I first interned in Senate offices in 2000 and 2001. Then I got my first job. The idealism was beaten out of me like an ACME anvil being dropped on Wile E. Coyote. It wasn't pretty.

So for me to be inspired is quite a feat. Thing is, I believe Obama. It helps to read his first book, Dreams from my Father. He wrote it well before actually getting into politics, and it tells much of his life story. It's a very real story of a very unique childhood. (It's also damn well written.) What it said to me, more than anything, was that Obama understands the complexities of the world and the people who filled it. Unlike the average Washington animal, Obama would see the consequences of his actions as affecting real people.

He has been accused of being a bit lacking in substance. And yes, Obama has not exactly gone around touting detailed solutions for every policy challenge. But is he supposed to? Presidents are supposed to provide vision and direction for the country, be someone that our citizens and the rest of the world can look to for direction and inspiration.

Details will be worked out. No presidential initiative goes through Congress without changes. That's what the administrative bureaucracy is there for. Presidents need to create the context that make initiatives actually succeed.

And experience? What exactly does that mean for a President? Obama actually has more formal foreign policy experience than every post-Nixon president except for George H. W. Bush, whose years in intelligence didn't exactly make him a foreign policy-whiz.

But any president makes things a crapshoot. Having oodles of time serving in the Senate or wherever doesn't always guarantee you'll know what to do when shit hits the fan. And "experience" often really is a code word for playing the game the usual way.

Which is my most serious criticism of Hillary Clinton. Let me be honest, I like Hillary. She's a very nice person and an extremely capable legislator who has performed quite well in the Senate. If I were a New Yorker I'd be thrilled to have her there.

She does, however, play the political game the way it's usually played. She and her husband have been in the spotlight of national politics for sixteen years now. They play the game. They aren't going to change it. Hillary in the White House would, unfortunately, mean more of the usual shenanigans of the last seven years, the ones that helped drive me out of Washington.

And John Edwards, whom I also really like (a picture of him with my friend Geoff and I from back in 2000 hangs on my wall) really wants to make Washington into one big fight. Everything's corporate greed against the middle class for him. A nice tagline to be the next Che Guevara, but not what we need to lead the entire United States.

Imagine: a President with the speaking skills of Reagan but the brains of JFK. With the charisma of Bill Clinton but the clean behavior of Carter.

Americans are already starting to imagine just what I described, and they're showing it, coming out in record numbers in Iowa and likely in New Hampshire.

Some years ago, I watched a PBS documentary about Robert F. Kennedy. He was a fascinating figure -- rarely mentioned is that he was one of Joe McCarthy's counsels during the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee hearings that exposed supposed communist sympathizers.

What struck me about that documentary was that when RFK ran for president in 1968, he was greeted by increasingly large and passionate crowds everywhere he went. Rather than simply being someone that people tended to prefer, he seemed to be a phenomenon in himself. The Hannah Montana of the late '60s. And after he was assasinated, countless thousands lined the railroad along which his body was carried.

The modern political cynic in me thought that either PBS had used rose-colored glasses to show the support for RFK or that such adulation was simply impossible in these days. When did you ever see throngs line up for Al Gore or John Kerry? To defeat Bush, that was something worth screaming at the top of your lungs. But did John Kerry really get a rise out of anyone?

Sure, Howard Dean did, but that was more of a coalescing of the anti-war movement than any true personality attraction.

Obama, though, seems to have the magic touch. He seems to get people to believe he can actually deliver change. Record turnouts in Iowa -- something Howard Dean never achieved -- attest to that.

And he got this cynic to believe.