Who's the Real Obama?
Why not Obama? Millions of people are inspired by him; witness the polls, the stunning breadth of his financial support, the rapture over his way of speaking. He is the first black candidate to have a serious chance of winning his party's nomination and the presidency. That is a remarkable statement of how far America has come on race-but it also reflects Barack Obama's ability to present himself as a politician for all Americans, just somebody who happens to be black. America seems to yearn for a post-partisan consensus builder who is undeniably brilliant, rather than an ideological rabble-rouser, despite a voting record that places him on the ultraliberal wing of the Democratic Party.
Pause comes when we look beyond biography. The world has rarely been in a more dangerous state. Time bombs tick in the Middle East. Radical Muslims plan more terrorism. From London, there is evidence of how eager they are to betray a host nation, yet Europe is enfeebled. China and Russia are unhelpful. There is worldwide disaffection with America. And unparalleled means of destruction are more available than ever before. Is charisma enough to avert catastrophe?
Foreign affairs are no longer "foreign." In the globalized world, they are in our living room. Obama is virtually a freshman here. His political rivals have decades of experience with personalities and interests abroad. Obama's retort: It was foreign policy experts and longtime members of Congress who authorized the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq. So maybe that type of experience is overrated. That's a good debating point, but what Obama really has going for him is that party-centered politics and politics based on experience have given way to candidate-centered politics where celebrity and personal appeal on television seem to win the day. He may also benefit from the growing anti-Washington feeling.
But Obama will not be able to maintain that "above politics" stance. If his broad themes are to remain credible, he will have to be more than a smooth and sweet-talking optimist. He will have to detail just what he would do on health, global warming, Iran. Is he tough-minded enough not just to take a punch but to give one? People who know him well doubt this. If they're right, he will become another one of those failed candidates like Adlai Stevenson, who bemoaned the dirty business of politics and tried to run campaigns that rose above it.
His supporters expect Iraq to be his trump card. He can assert that his objections to the war in 2002 were prescient. Saddam Hussein, he said, "poses no imminent or direct threat to the United States or to his neighbors." He gave warning, too, that "even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, and undetermined consequences."
War questions. But Obama is playing a bit of politics here. He was not always so critical. At the 2004 Democratic convention, he said he did not blame Democrats who had voted to authorize the war, recognizing that, unlike him, they were privy to intelligence that might have led them to support the war. He now seems not to have thought this thing through. He claims that a U.S. withdrawal will pressure the Sunnis and Shiites to come to the table. But why should it? If they cannot resolve their differences when we are there with 150,000 troops keeping them apart, what does he expect if we withdraw? Surely that will lead to an escalation of the conflict. There is the real prospect, as the Brookings Institution suggests, of "a humanitarian nightmare in which hundreds of thousands (conceivably even millions)" of people will die, to the everlasting shame and diminution of respect for the United States.
On this crucial issue of the use of American power, Obama is inconsistent. He has a different tune when he turns to Darfur. He urges deployment of a "U.N. or NATO-led force" and recently accused the administration of conducting "foreign policy as if the children in Darfur are somehow less than the children here, and so we tolerate violence there." What a strange equivalence.
On the Rwandan genocide, he suggests that "an international show of force ... might have stopped the slaughter." As the historian Niall Ferguson points out, Obama is trying to have it all ways in the different civil wars. "In one, Obama recommends intervention (Darfur), while in the other he recommends a military withdrawal (Iraq)." In fact, far more than in Sudan, the United States bears a moral responsibility to prevent an even more horrendous Iraqi bloodbath. We cannot be absolved from dealing with the mess there that we have created.
For now, the senator is the most impressive insurgent candidate. But if he is to maintain momentum, he must grow. Along with his uplifting eloquence, he must show a capacity for leading the West-and above all for realism and resolution in the deployment of American power for the common good.
This story appears in the May 14, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.