Obama: After 20 years of Bush-Clinton, a Breeze Stirs

4/20/08

The historic choice facing Democrats ought to be a happy one: Their nominee either will be the first woman or the first African-­American to head a major party’s presidential ticket, and both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are candidates of extraordinary talent. Yet the Democratic campaign has turned ugly, perhaps because the policy differences between Clinton and Obama are small enough to magnify issues of temperament and character. The economy is cooling, the climate is warming and the United States is fighting two wars — while the Democrats trade barbs over such minutiae as sniper fire and lapel pins.

The dispiriting tone of the campaign echoes that of the past several election cycles, in which the voters’ divisions over small matters have been exploited for transitory gain, obscuring the need for clarity of purpose in confronting the many large challenges that face the nation. A weariness with wedge politics should lead Democrats to choose not just between two politicians, but between two styles of politics. Voters should grasp the opportunity to open a new chapter — a chapter with a fresh political vocabulary, elevated discourse and rekindled hopes.

Obama offers that opportunity, and Oregon Democrats should support him in the May 20 primary election.

Clinton has the misfortune of being inextricably associated with the politics of the past — a misfortune not entirely of her own making. Many Democrats, witnessing her stamina and poise in the campaign marathon leading from Iowa to Oregon, must find themselves thinking that they elected the wrong Clinton in 1992. Yet she cannot avoid a close association with her husband’s presidency and the waste of its potential through self-indulgence and scandal, flaws that helped deliver the White House to George W. Bush in 2000.

Clinton has a well-developed plan for health care reform, but if she sent it to Congress as president, her proposal surely would be examined through the lens of the failed plan she crafted in 1993. Clinton’s positions on issues of trade have evolved, but no one would forget that the North American Free Trade Agreement was a product of her husband’s administration.

Name any issue — from taxes to Cabinet appointments, from public lands management to defense — and the ghosts of the 1990s would be standing over Clinton’s shoulder.

These reverberations are amplified by Clinton’s own political reflexes, which lead her to perform political triangulations of the type that her husband perfected. Her 2003 vote to support the war in Iraq — the most consequential vote of Clinton’s Senate career — is the most prominent example. She was swept along at the time by the widespread belief that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, as well as by a calculated desire to look tough. Clinton now attempts to minimize the significance of her vote and will not acknowledge her small portion of responsibility for the war she helped launch. Democrats had a presidential nominee in 2004 who was both for and against the war, and it did not end well.

Obama is free of all that baggage, which liberates him to credibly promise to move the nation beyond the past 20 years of Bush and Clinton presidencies. His domestic policy proposals differ in many details from Clinton’s, but the biggest difference is that they would be received as representing not a reaction to the Bush administration or a continuation of the one before, but a real break with the past.

Obama is said to lack experience, having served only four years in the U.S. Senate. Yet his record in elective office, including state legislative service, is longer than Clinton’s. Obama has been hammered for not leaving a church where the pastor, Jeremiah Wright, has spoken with an anger so intense as to be offensive. But it is an anger that is not confined to a single church in Chicago, and the country needs leaders who can understand such emotions while rejecting them. Obama is taking hits for being condescending toward small-town white voters. Yet condescension, if that’s what it really was, is better than the pandering to which Americans have grown accustomed.

Against the weaknesses identified by his critics, Obama has great strengths. He is the best orator to seek the presidency in a generation. His candidacy has captured the imagination of young Americans and has reached far across the partisan divide. He would represent to the world a new face of America. The themes of his campaign — hope, unity, optimism — are right for darkening times.

Oregon has a rare moment of relevance in the nominating process. Oregon Democrats should use it to give Barack Obama the chance to become the first Democratic president of the 21st century.