Date: 2008-01-02 12:30 Subject: Obama for President Security: Public

Barack Obama will not be on the ballot for the Michigan Democratic Primary on January 15th. He, John Edwards, Joe Biden and Bill Richardson all removed their names after Michigan moved its primary up before Feb. 5th, which violated national party rules. I'm bummed about this, because I fear it may be my only chance to vote for him. (Write-ins for any of those four candidates, under stupid state law, will not be counted, so the best bet for their supporters is to vote "Uncommitted".) Although he has surged in the polls in recent weeks, Obama really must win Iowa and New Hampshire to overcome the commanding lead Hillary Clinton has in national polls. If Iowa winds up going for Edwards or Clinton, I think Obama is probably toast, and Hillary will be the nominee.

Esme would much rather see me support Hillary. As she likes to say, "I'm going to be the second woman president, and Hillary Clinton's going to be the first." I wouldn't be a bit surprised if that became a literal statement of fact someday.

But, with all due respect to my very presidential daughter, Obama's my choice, mainly because of my perception of what makes a good president. Above all, I think it takes a particular kind of intelligence, the kind that can sort through a complex array of facts, theories and opinions, and come up with the best answer to a difficult problem. Presidents who take a reductionist approach can sometimes get lucky, but more often wind up mired in catastrophe. Our current president is an obvious example, but I fear John Edwards would have the same kind of problem; the language he uses is relentlessly reductionist, especially when he gets on the anti-corporate bandwagon. I'm not comfortable with big corporations, but my feelings about them are considerably more ambivalent than Edwards' are, and I suspect that's true for a very large number of Americans, most of whom are employed by big corporations.

There are also presidents who try to wrestle with the complexities but can't manage to see their way clear through them (I'm thinking here of someone like Lyndon Johnson, a smart man who just didn't have the right kind of smarts). I get the uneasy feeling that Hillary might be this sort of president. Her response to NY Gov. Spitzer's plan to give driver's licenses to illegal immigrants was a case in point. She had several opportunities to lay out a clear point of view, but instead she kept giving an answer that amounted to little more than, "Well, it's complicated." Of course, she might have just been trying to avoid saying anything that would come back to haunt her later, in the hopes that the issue would just go away and everyone would forget it. But that in itself reveals a way of thinking that I'm not sure I want to see in a president. All the (viable) candidates, including Obama, tend to exhibit caution on touchy subjects, but when your cautiousness paralyzes you, it's hard to maintain the impression that you're in charge and you know what you're doing.

So what evidence do I have that Obama is the kind of person who can embrace complexity without being paralyzed by it? Partly, it's because of the kind of work he did in his younger days, working as a community organizer, which is the kind of work where you have to be continually creative with your solutions because you have to divide a very small pie amongst a large number of very deserving interests. By all accounts, he thrived in that kind of environment. I also like the way he's run his campaign, which despite hitting many rough patches has had no major upheavals, no personnel shifts, no wild swings in tone and message, no pointing the finger at staffers for his own mistakes. He's also been steady in his message, but has subtly adapted it as the months have gone on, which indicates that he's listening to what people are saying and responding to them.

I also like Obama's principles. Obama caught a lot of people's attention at the 2004 Democratic convention with a speech where he rejected the notion of separate red-state and blue-state cultures and insisted that it is precisely America's cacophony that is its strength. He reiterated that vision in a speech in Iowa several weeks ago. One of the most appealing things about Bill Clinton was the way he seemed to relish how different people were, yet still find common ground with them. Obama seems to see things in a similar way.

Furthermore, I like the fact that Obama's principles are grounded in an outlook rather than in some particular intellectual philosophy. Ron Paul's supporters like to tout the fact that he is remarkably consistent in his policy positions, which invariably follow rationally from his basic principles. But Paul's principles are rooted in a particularly hostile view of government, and many of his policy positions are untenable. Obama's policy positions, by comparison, are mostly fuzzy generalities. But where he has laid out specifics, he has shown a penchant for addressing the realities, and yes, the complexities of the problem at hand rather than promoting a particular intellectual framework. (See Timothy Noah's defense of Obama's health care plan, which unlike Clinton's and Edwards', does not mandate purchasing national health insurance.) This, it seems to me, is the recipe for success for a president, because it minimizes the chance of getting locked in to a particular direction even when it proves to be the wrong direction.

I do wish Obama had more executive experience than he does; that's his greatest weakness. He'll make political blunders and will probably have a terrible first year if he's elected, unlike Hillary, who would probably have some success from the get-go simply because she's already learned how to play the Washington game. But this campaign has demonstrated that he's a very quick learner; and in the long run (four years being a very long run nowadays), I think his approach to an increasingly interconnected and fractious world will be the winning one. I'll be fine with Clinton and even Edwards if one of them is the nominee. But our best choice, our best hope for repairing the damage done by the Bush administration, is Barack Obama.