Obama has been visiting Oregon the last couple days and has been getting an inordinate amount of press coverage in the local media. This isn’t surprising or anything but two things of note:
- Arguably, it doesn’t make a big difference who is elected president. I am one to believe that politicians often go back on their word and are more moderate and more extreme on views we’d like them to be more extreme/moderate on. I am also one to believe that being a good President isn’t necessarily a matter of political skill but of timing and…well, let’s be blunt: dumb luck.
- Imagine if Reagan had won the nomination in 1976 and won the Presidency. Would he be as universally lauded as the right person for the time? Hell, I have doubts he would would have been re-elected.
- Imagine if Nixon had won in 1960. Assuming he does or doesn’t get assassinated, he is probably looked at much more differently than the politically hardened Nixon we saw win later in his career.
- That’s not to say that presidents don’t make their own destiny, or that there aren’t bad presidents, just bad circumstances; just that we often assign more control over world events to presidents than they deserve (in good and bad)
- On the other hand, if some political experience does matter for Democrats (or at least effectiveness in political experience), don’t you really have to look more closely at Clinton? First of all, she is married to a master politician and it really shows in her work in the Senate. You can make a really easy argument that Hillary was at least twice as effective as Obama in gaining influence and pushing through an agenda that served her and her constituents well for the first four years of her Senate bid. Let’s couple that with the fact that her first four years was two as a split majority and two as a minority party and that Bush and Republicans were basically untouchable from 9/11 until mid 2003, that’s impressive. Obama has had a weak Republican majority for two years and one year and change as a majority party. We can talk about her judgment on one issue (defense where she is hawkish), but her ability to deliver as a junior senator has been really interesting.
And honestly, part of Obama’s appeal to me as a conservative is that he has a lot of big ideas but that those ideas still have to go through Washington DC. He is not terribly effective as a politician and that might be refreshing for some and it certainly doesn’t bother me but for entirely different reasons. If you want to make JFK comparisons, consider one of JFK’s bigger ideas was to put a man on the moon. Considering the fact that there wasn’t a ton of political baggage with this and it could be considered defense project (and thus given extra funding and priority with minimal political baggage). Let’s also consider that DC in 1960 was immensely less bureaucratic than today’s government.
Guess how long it took us to get to the moon? Eight years. That’s two presidential terms. And this isn’t even as politicized as some of the proposals Obama has made.
I think both Obama and McCain are in a unique position to come off as genuine people to the casual moderates who often tip the scale for candidates. To a certain extent at least, I believe both to be true to their word in this sense. I think what differentiates McCain’s experience from Obama’s inexperience is that McCain has learned how to get his way on policy when it is really important to him and still come off as a disinterested Washington outsider (a.k.a. the maverick label). If Obama doesn’t win the presidency, he could easily be in the same position as a Senator. Someone enormously popular at home and has a big enough national image to not have to bow to party pressure when he doesn’t want to (but also knows when to toe the line unlike the “hated” Lieberman).
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