To be fair, Barack Obama is a newcomer to the national presidential stage and has not had to undergo the rigid autopsy that the press, pundits, and opposition put candidates through. So it is difficult to read and hear about his "rookie mistakes"" as this piece in The Politico points out.
So many of the issues seem trivial to me, details lost in storytelling, but they are the kind of "bird pecks" that can start to undermine a candidate. Someone like a Hillary Clinton has been bird pecked to death, and so you know what you are getting with her and she knows how to respond. Obama is, by some measures, pristine in the world of politics. Of course it is our American nature to tarnish those images as much as possible to see how a candidate can rise above it.
It will be telling to see how Obama continues to shape his line of reason and react to some much he put down in print or said publicly before he decided to run for office.
Ron Brownstein raises the fascinating question about what type of candidate Barack Obama can ultimately become...warrior or priest. The money quotes for me:
It's not much of an oversimplification to say that the blue-collar Democrats tend to see elections as an arena for defending their interests, and the upscale voters see them as an opportunity to affirm their values. Each group finds candidates who reflect those priorities.
Democratic professionals often describe this sorting as a competition between upscale "wine track" candidates and blue-collar "beer track" contenders. Another way to express the difference is to borrow from historian John Milton Cooper Jr.'s telling comparison of the pugnacious Theodore Roosevelt and the idealistic Woodrow Wilson. Cooper described the long rivalry between Republican Roosevelt and Democrat Wilson as a contest between a warrior and a priest.
In modern times, the Democratic presidential race has usually pitted a warrior against a priest.Warrior candidates stress their ability to deliver on kitchen table concerns and revel in political combat. They tout their experience and flout their scars. Their greatest strength is usually persistence, not eloquence; they don't so much inspire as reassure. Think of Harry Truman in 1948, Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and, in a somewhat more diluted fashion, Walter Mondale in 1984 and John Kerry in 2004.
The priests, whose lineage runs back through McCarthy to Adlai Stevenson, present a very different face. They write books and sometimes verse. They observe the campaign's hurly-burly through a filter of cool, witty detachment. Their campaigns become crusades, fueled as much by inchoate longing for a "new politics" as tangible demands for new policies. In the past quarter of a century, Hart, Bradley and the late neo-liberal Paul Tsongas in 1992 each embodied the priest in Democratic presidential politics....
Not only have priests — including Hart, Tsongas and Bradley — run better among voters with college degrees, they've tended to run well in the Northeast, the West
Coast and portions of the upper Midwest where wine track voters congregate; the
warriors usually thrive in interior states such as Ohio, Missouri or Tennessee, where college graduates constitute 40% or less of the Democratic electorate.
That picture is coming into focus again, with one twist. The priests typically have been flattened among black voters, but Obama's African American heritage is helping him, already, to split the black vote fairly closely with Clinton in most surveys...
Since Obama entered the campaign, the question he's faced most often is whether he is "black enough" to win votes from African Americans. But the more relevant issue may be whether Obama is "blue enough" to increase his support among blue-collar whites.
I guess this article really effects the lense with which I view the campaign much more. Just reading it made me very aware of my own personal biasis toward the messages I hear from the Obama and Clinton camps and it makes great sense to me. I feel a strong disconnect from the blue collar folks out there and so their reality is often not always on my radar. I can totally see the compelling pull of the Clinton message to the blue collar worker who has to look out for number one more so then the grand ideology of a "priest" like Obama. Perhaps it is my own history, since graduating high school I have never been apart from the college campus. Having just moved off campus I am beginning to get "back in touch" with some of the realities of the world at large, but I still come from a place of such privlege that I cannot fully grasp some of the issues out there.
The article points out that priests have clearly been clobbered at the polls unless they make a transition toward the warrior front, someone like a Bill Clinton who walked like a warrior but had the vision of a priest can do well. However I am now very tuned into the message of Obama and how it might play to folks that are not neccessarily part of that University Ivory Tower. Perhaps he has the potential to rise above his small mistakes and find the warrior mentality. Perhaps he is too far seperated from his days of a community activist to reclaim it. It is a difficult road for him to walk, but one he must, because Clinton can do the warrior better, and John Edwards is certainly already well established as a priest. Could Barack Obama be the Paladin of the campaign (only WoW players may understand this analogy)?? Only time will tell.
