The New Yorker: The Relaunch of Obama

[babylonsister]

The Relaunch
Can Barack Obama catch Hillary Clinton?
by Ryan Lizza

snip//

“Hard truths” could be the slogan for the re-started Obama campaign, which, until the October 30th Democratic debate in Philadelphia, had been viewed as listless and fading. (By contrast, Hillary Clinton was often called the inevitable nominee.) During that debate, Clinton’s performance was criticized as evasive and weak; Clinton herself acknowledged, “I wasn’t at my best.” Afterward, David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, summoning all the spin at his command, described the new, unfettered Obama: “The public is looking for someone who will level with them, even when it means telling them things that they don’t necessarily agree with or want to hear. They value honesty. They value candor. They value straightforwardness. They don’t want calculation and parsing. They don’t want someone who confers with their pollster on every move.”

Obama has begun to embrace positions that a generation of Democrats have been advised to avoid. The political “textbook” calls for a relatively inexperienced first-term senator to run hawkishly. Obama, whom Clinton criticized when he said that he would negotiate directly and without preconditions with America’s adversaries, now makes it a point to mention that he would sit down with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s President. On the question of torture, which Obama unequivocally opposes, the political temptation is to signal a willingness to show no mercy to our worst enemies, in much the way that Governor Bill Clinton, in his first campaign for President, returned to Arkansas for the execution of Rickey Ray Rector, a mentally disabled death-row inmate. On the increasingly perilous subject of illegal immigration, Obama favors issuing state driver’s licenses to undocumented workers, and tells voters, “We are not going to send twelve million people back home.” When discussing his energy plan, Obama says, “You can’t deal with global warming without, at least, on the front end, initially, seeing probably some spike in electricity prices,” and on Social Security he proposes what is, in effect, a large tax hike. These issues all have one thing in common: Hillary Clinton’s positions are artfully vague—aimed at surviving the general election—while Obama insists that it is more important to be forthcoming.

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http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/11/26/071126fa_fact_lizza