And now, for his second performance ....
A recent editorial I read compared the Obama campaign to a third party movement. The author (I no longer remember where I read this) compared BO to Gene McCarthy, Ross Perot, Nader, etc .. because all of these guys represented movements, of perhaps personified them.
Moreover, in this sense, the Obama machine is awesome. It can out organize the dem party and out fund raise the party as well. BUT, Obamania remains a personal movement.
One of the most striking examples of this is the lack of credible surrogates .. if one excepts Michelle. Not only is there a lack of surrogates, the campaign really lacks any generals below Obama himself. Axelrod and Plouffe, the campaign braintrust are awesome but they are not obviously ideological. The ideologues on the team ... Kennedy, Bradley,Tribe, seem rather quiet .. at least when you comapre them to the cacophony on the Clinton side. Even Brezhinski, one of the most vocal vips in America, has become quiet since signing onto team Obama.
Why is Obama, Inc so centered on one man? The obvious answer is a worrisome one; Obama is very much a special person, natural leader with Reagan/Kennedy charisma and the IQ of Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon. His colleagues may simply be cowed by the presence of greatness!
I find this quasi religious story hard to take and inconsistent with the government in waiting Obama appears to have assembled as advisers. These include a very young crew, as young as 35 with most in their 40s. Many are faculty at Harvard, Stanford, Berkely, Chicago and they represent overall a strong centrist point of view. Many now serve or have served with major public policy groups and .. at least among the older members of the team, a number were aides in the Clinton era. Among the recognizeable names: Samantha Power (foreign policy), Austan Goolsbee (economics), Lawrence Tribe (law), Jeffrey Liebman (soical security), Christina and David Romer (macroeconomics), , Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar (immigration, latino issues), Preeta Bansal (Asians, high tech immigration, international civil rights issues, woman's rights), Tony Lake (foreign affairs, Iraq),Susan Rice (Africa),John Brennan (intelligence), Jason Grumet (environment, works for a policy center founded by four recent Senate majority leaders), David Cutler (health care, Obamcare), Stuart Altman
(Obamacare, health policies),Heather Higginbottom (policy strategies), ... these are all highly professional wonks .. representing the sort of brain trust we have not seen in government since Kennedy.
Over and over again when I google these folks there is a story of conversion .. of meeting or hearing Obama and wanting to work with him.
Noticeably absent from this list are such shrill voices as Carville, Lani Guanier, Howard Wolfespon, Ira Magaziner, or Lani Davis.
The question is, having put together such a crew, can and will BO lead then into government positions and provide them with the kind of leadership that now seems sadly lacking in the similar crew that came to power with JFK?
One worrisome indication, is the lack of close advisers from the relatively a political worlds of business and science. His own science advisers seem to have little direct contact with Obama., although perhaps more contact then Clinton's have with her. This makes me worry ... many of the decisions Obama will have to make depend on hard ass science. Fir example his energy adviser, Jason Grunet, has come up with a plan to invest an awful l0ot of money into a sort of Obama version of the Star Wars Initiative, this time directed at energy. Fair enough but Mr. Grunet's credentials do not seem to include expertise in physics or engineering. Is he capable of planning for research where the only answers may violate the laws of thermodynamics .. like the first star wars effort under Ronnie Reagan?
Similarly, Larry Lessig .. a tech adviser from Google, is a Stanford attorney rather than a computer scientist. Policy is important BUT it nee4ds to be formed form facts and I am concerned that Obama does not seem to include scientists in his coterie. Tom Robey, another Seattle blogger, has several interesting essays about science and 08 politics.
As I think about, I am getting worried. Obama's coterie seems too ... well, serious. Planners and policy wonks may lack the vision that more creative types bring to the table. When I imagine the best that Obama might be, my hope is that he could be a Jefferson. Our third President, however, was never very successful as a policy wonk. His contributions might never have born fruit if Jefferson vision had not been metered through the ever rational Madison and melded with the wonkish structures implaced in government by Hamilton. I will feel more confidant in Barack when I learn that some of his coterie are the sort of crazy folks I hang out with.
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