Where's Obama's Passion?
By Joe Klein
A few days before Barack Obama was to announce his choice for Vice President, he was asked at a North Carolina town meeting what qualities he wanted in a running mate. He wandered through a derisive, if desultory, critique of Dick Cheney, then switched gears. "I want somebody ... who shares with me a passion to make the lives of the American people better than they are right now," he said. "I want somebody who is mad right now that people are losing their jobs." And I immediately thought, Uh-oh.
Memories of John Kerry in 2004 came flooding back, of how he tended to describe his feelings rather than experience them, of how he suddenly --and unconvincingly -- started to say he was "angry" about this or that when his consultants told him that Howard Dean's anger about the war in Iraq was hitting home with voters. And then, in the general election, Kerry kept repeating the word strength rather than demonstrating it. Clearly, Obama's consultants have given him similar advice, that he was on the short end of a passion gap -- that it was time for emo. A day earlier, he had said wage disparities between genders made his "blood boil."
One of the great strengths of the Obama candidacy has been the sense that this is a guy whose blood doesn't boil, who carefully considers the options before he reacts--and that his reaction is always measured and rational. But that's also a weakness: sometimes the most rational response is to rip your opponent's lungs out. On the same day as the North Carolina meeting, Obama spoke to the Veterans of Foreign Wars and reacted with carefully prepared passion to John McCain's scurrilous campaign theme that Obama doesn't put America first. "Let me be clear: I will let no one question my love of this country," he said, to the best applause he received from that skeptical crowd. It was an effective moment, but defensive. It was not how you win a presidential campaign.
Heading into a crucial moment in this race -- his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention -- Obama was failing as a candidate in two crucial areas. He had failed to define his opponent, and he was failing, in all but the most amorphous ways, to define himself. He desperately needed to do unto McCain what McCain had done unto him: hammer his opponent in a sustained, thematic way -- not just a few tossed-away lines in a stump speech. That shouldn't be too difficult. An argument can be made that McCain is trigger-happy overseas and out of touch at home. In fact, Matt Welch made a convincing trigger-happy argument against McCain in Reason magazine -- a libertarian publication -- cataloging all the times over the past 20 years that McCain has overreacted to international crises, down to his recent ridiculous statement that the situation in Georgia was "the first probably serious crisis internationally since the end of the Cold War." After the past seven years, Americans are, rightfully, war-weary, and McCain is a candidate who can't seem to go a day without proclaiming a crisis somewhere that demands an American military reaction. Indeed, this should be the natural predicate for Obama's positive argument in this election: that we desperately need to get our act together at home.
But Obama seems not to have fully assimilated what should be the message of his campaign: It's the economy, egghead. The economy was almost entirely missing from his dialogue with Pastor Rick Warren at Saddleback Church -- and there were more than a few opportunities to insert it. When Warren braced him on abortion, Obama fumbled around, attempting to sound reasonable. He should have said straight out, "We're gonna disagree on this one. I respect your view on abortion, but I'm pro-choice ... And you know, Pastor Rick, Jesus never mentions abortion in the Bible. He did say, though, that it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter heaven. Now, that's a metaphor -- but it's also good tax policy. Unlike John McCain, I want to make it easier for rich people to go to heaven."
He might also have mentioned that he favored the current bipartisan energy proposal that would permit offshore drilling and invest in alternative energy, but McCain opposed it because it would "raise taxes" on the oil companies by closing loopholes.
The last question at the North Carolina town meeting came from a homeless veteran who said more than half of the 200 people living in his shelter were veterans too. Obama gave a solid, substantive answer. What he should have said was, "That's outrageous! Why don't we go over there right now -- I'd like to thank them for their service and see what we can do to help." That sort of spontaneity -- that sort of real passion -- is what's missing from this candidacy. I suspect Obama will have a hard time winning unless he finds some of it.