Yes We Can...What?

Team Obama is in full campaign mode, firing off e-mails and organizing events to push ahead for health care reform, but nobody knows exactly where the goal line is.

According to the Washington Post, "President Obama's supporters hope to recapture the energy of last year's triumphant election campaign in a bid to regain control of the health-care debate, planning more than 2,000 house parties, rallies and town hall meetings across the country over the next two weeks."

The trouble with such exertion is that the object is not pulling the lever in a presidential election or urging a simple affirmative Congressional vote but influencing thousands of pages of still-shifting legislation in both Houses.

Yes, we can...what?

In the morass of issues involved, only the public option has come into focus to be distorted by lobbyists and loons into a future of government control and death panels, Big Lies that have to be answered with long and convoluted explanations

The demagoguery level is so high that Paul Krugman today resorts to nostalgia for the Unindicted Co-Conspirator, arguing that "Nixon’s proposal for health care reform looks a lot like Democratic proposals today. In fact, in some ways it was stronger."

On the other side of the ideological divide, George Will asserts, with some justice, that on health care reform "our ubiquitous president became the nation's elevator music, always out and about, heard but not really listened to, like audible wallpaper."

All this puts Obama supporters in the position of rushing around in all directions, trying to contain the flames of opposition in the equivalent of a Chinese fire drill.

As the Right revels in its newfound voice and the Left indicts the President for losing his nerve, health care reform is evolving beyond a crucial political and economic issue.

In many ways, it is becoming a test of how well American democracy can let rational voices be heard in a 21st century Tower of Babel--of whether Obama's new politics has enough power to revive and revitalize the best of the old.

The Obama-Bill Clinton Thing

All along, below the radar of contesting Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama has been matched up with her husband in a battle of both substance and style that reflects generational differences.

Now, at the end of Jeremiah Wright Week, as Obama is out there doing TV interviews to stop his slide in the polls, the contrasts with Bill Clinton are coming into sharper focus.

In his speech on race in Philadelphia, Obama tried to put the Wright YouTube clips into context--an admirable trait in a president but treacherous for a candidate, as it soon proved to be.

Contrast this with Bill Clinton's Sister Souljah moment in 1992. Granted, Clinton had no previous connection with her, but, after her inflammatory rhetoric about white people after the Los Angeles riots, he didn't hesitate to make political points by condemning her for black racism at a meeting of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition.

That's what politicians do. But Obama, by trying to address the issue of race seriously before Wright's antics forced his hand, has been politically wounded by not throwing his pastor to the media wolves as soon as the issue surfaced.

It's this serious deliberation that seems to rankle Bill Clinton most. In New Hampshire, he branded Obama's opposition to the Iraq war as a "fairy tale." After South Carolina, the former president pooh-poohed Obama's victory by pairing him with Jesse Jackson and, when he was criticized for it, claimed that Obama was playing the "race card" on him.

Now on a shorter leash after embarrassing Hillary's campaign, Bill Clinton is out there less visibly using his old-politics style in North Carolina and Indiana. It's as if Obama's surge toward the nomination with a new kind of appeal to younger voters is a personal affront.

Bill Clinton is telling his generation that "once you've reached a certain age, you won't sit there and listen to somebody tell you there's really no difference between what happened in the Bush years and the Clinton years."

But what seems to bother him most is the potential difference between both those eras and what might become the Obama years.

The Bushed Generation

Tomorrow's Pennsylvania primary will most likely settle nothing, but there is an outside chance that the results could end it all. If Barack Obama wins by even one vote, it's over.

The slice-and-dice demographics show Hillary Clinton running strong among blue-collar voters, gun owners and bowlers, but there is a less obvious layer of the electorate that could surprise the experts--the voters who were pre-pubescent when George W. Bush took power.

These 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds who are either in college or entering the work force into a dismal economy have been registering in large numbers, and despite all the negative ads and campaigning, may find Obama's message of new politics and hope irresistible. He could win the nomination on their disgust with what eight years of the worst presidency in modern times has wrought.

At a rally yesterday, Obama said, "You have a real choice in this election. Either Democrat would be better than John McCain, and all three of us would be better than George Bush.

"But what you have to ask yourself is who has the chance to actually really change things in a fundamental way so that 10 years from now or 20 years from now you can look back and you can say boy we really moved in a new direction and we put the country on a better path."

According to an AP reporter, "The comment threatened to undercut Obama's efforts--and those of the entire Democratic Party--to portray the GOP presidential nominee-in-waiting as nothing more than an extension of Bush's unpopular tenure. At the very least, it provides fodder Republicans can use to prop up McCain."

But it may well be that the conventional wisdom of propping up McCain misses the point of this election. Pennsylvania's youngest voters may settle that question tomorrow.

Hillary-Barack Face to Face

After Obama’s decision to curtail his role in the endless pseudo-debate schedule, how can the Democratic front runners give voters what they really need to decide who is best suited to clean up the Bush mess and lead the country forward?

Despite what polls show now, the choice between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will be close and crucial, and the two of them have an opportunity to get beyond canned campaigning and set an example to offset the politics of personal destruction that decided the last two presidential elections.

They would be serving their country, their party and, ultimately, their own interests by using a fraction of the millions they have amassed to buy TV time for a real debate of their differences--no moderators, videos or other gimmicks--about the war in Iraq, health care, immigration policy and the tension between homeland security and individual rights, among other subjects.

Conventional wisdom might argue against Clinton’s doing it because she is ahead in the polls, but conventional wisdom has never encompassed a Presidential contest between a woman and a man of color.

Clinton and Obama are members of the same party who have more in common than the manufactured sound bites and campaign gotchas indicate, and they may very well end up on a ticket together.

Why not provide an example of grownup politics for a country exhausted by the idiocy of show-business campaigning? Why not show what politics can be rather than what it has become? Why not give their supporters--and all voters--a sample of the kind of change they want?

They don’t have to be Lincoln and Douglas but, amid all the
madness to come in the next fifteen months, Clinton and Obama could show us some sanity that would eventually serve them and all Americans well. At the very least, it would provide a contrast to the Republican mud fight that is sure to come.

Obama's New Politics and Old Friends

In all the to-do about Barack Obama as “new,” it’s easy to lose sight of his connections to the Kennedy era that transformed American politics half a century ago.

A lengthy Washington Post profile today is headed, “A Series of Fortunate Events” and summarized: “Barack Obama needed more than talent and ambition to rocket from obscure state senator to presidential contender in three years. He needed serious luck.”

True enough, but what strikes an older reader is the part played in his political ascent by two important figures associated with the Democratic idealism of the 1960s and 1970s.

Before he decided to run for President, Obama consulted those two mentors, Newton Minow and Abner Mikva.

“Shortly before Christmas 2006,” the Post reports, “he met with Minow and Mikva to discuss whether to run. ‘He was very worried about what this was going to do to his family,’ says Minow. ‘I think Michelle at that point was very dubious, not at all enthusiastic about his running.’ The two men, who have six adult daughters between them, said they thought it made more sense to run when Obama's children were young and relatively insulated.”

Obama, who barely knew his own father, was turning for advice to two men who had nurtured his career to that point.

At Harvard Law School in 1988, he had impressed one of his professors, Martha Minow, who recommended him for a summer internship with the Chicago law firm headed by her father, Newton Minow, who had been chairman of the FCC under JFK and is still remembered for his speech describing TV as “a vast wasteland” and helping launch the public television network that is now PBS.

"He was at the firm for only one summer,” Minow recalls, “and when we offered him a job to come back, he came in to see me and told me he was going to go into politics. I think he had that in mind very early."

Minow became a friend and adviser to the young man with "the combination of a first-class intellect and a first-class temperament."

In 1990, he came to the attention of Abner Mikva, then a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, who offered him a clerkship, but Obama turned it down. A Chicago lawyer, Mikva had been a liberal Congressman who opposed the Daley machine, fought with the National Rifle Association over gun control and against racial discrimination. Later, he served briefly as chief counsel to Bill Clinton in the White House.

Mikva encouraged Obama in 2000 after he lost a primary and considered quitting politics. Four years later, when he was running for the Senate, Mikva “gave him more money than I've ever given anyone in my life."

Now Barack Obama is campaigning for a “new politics” in American life, but what he is offering clearly has roots in the best of the old.