Looking Back

In January 2007, word got out that Barack Obama was forming an exploratory committee for his run for the presidency. This is what I wrote at the time.

Wednesday, January 17, 2007
Obama '08?

It's not a big surprise that Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) has decided to form an exploratory committee to consider running for president in 2008. (Keith Olbermann said last night that using the term "exploratory" is ridiculous; of course he's going to run.)

The pundits are making a big deal out of this; not because Mr. Obama is a dynamic and commanding speaker, charismatic to the point of stellar, and has the refreshing pedigree that is as old as America but never before seen as a serious contender for the nomination. No, they're painting it as a tabloid-level battle between him and Sen. Hillary Clinton; CNN even went so far as to put up a caption of "Hillary vs. Obama," being slightly un-PC by referring to Ms. Clinton by her first name and Mr. Obama by his last. The way Wolf Blitzer discussed it on "The Situation Room" made me think I was watching an episode of "Access: Hollywood."

The right-wingers will have a tough time trashing Mr. Obama without coming across as racists, although that hasn't stopped nutballs like Debbie Schlussel from attacking him for something he has no control over such as his name and his father's ancestry. They will go after his lack of experience in government and foreign policy, although they will have a little trouble doing it with a straight face given the current occupant of the Oval Office. (Mr. Obama has said he will address that issue immediately by launching his campaign in Springfield, Illinois, the home and burial site of Abraham Lincoln, who served all of two years in Congress before becoming president.) They will dig up the fact that he once used cocaine, but Mr. Obama already brought up that issue several years ago in his own book and actually uses it as a talking point for showing how a young man on the road to ruin can turn himself around. Again, he's inoculated himself against attacks by the likes of well-known vice admirals like Rush Limbaugh (although rank hypocrisy and self-inflicted irony has never stopped him before) and Bill Bennett.

Then they will play their last card and do a big build-up to ask the most irrelevant yet brow-furrowing question of all: Is America Ready for a President Obama? Ah, the open-ended question; leaving it up to the responder to define what being "ready" means: are we ready for a black man in the White House? Are we ready for a president whose middle name is Hussein and whose last name ends with a vowel?

The answer is that it's a bullshit question and the only reason they ask it is because they can't come up with anything else that doesn't sound racist, trivial or just plain stupid. The questions about whether or not Sen. Obama should become the next president should be based on his leadership and the ability to use his skills and intelligence to guide the country and balance the politics with his vision. He has to rely on other people to tell him what to do and surround himself with smart people who may disagree with him, and he has to be able to listen to them. He has to be able to perform the job recognizing the fact that a president is both a partisan politician and the leader of the whole country, including the people who voted for someone else. It's a delicate balance, so throwing in trivialities such as his ancestry or the origins of his cognomen do nothing but skew the scale, and we might as well throw aside all pretense of considered debate and elect the next president using the same technique as they do on American Idol. If we'd asked those questions of several candidates in the past (and at least one that I can think of right now) and assuming that the electorate had paid attention to the answers, we might have gotten far different results.