Cerebral Obama risks losing average folks - NJ.com

Cerebral Obama risks losing average folks - NJ.com

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Cerebral Obama risks losing average folks
Tuesday, August 19, 2008

In the course of Adlai Stevenson's 1952 presidential bid, a woman called out to him as he was campaigning, "Senator, you have the vote of every thinking person!" To which the witty and eloquent Stevenson replied, "That's not enough, Madam. We need a majority."

Barack Obama would be well advised to heed Stevenson's caution about what happens to candidates who delight the literati but are seen as distant, even alien, by shot-and-a-beer types not given to perusing the New Yorker over a glass of white wine. The record shows they get clobbered.

With their national convention set to begin Monday, some Democrats are beginning to grumble that maybe Obama is too cerebral for his own good -- unwilling or constitutionally unable to respond to John McCain's tough talk with some tough talk of his own and too introspective and nuanced in confronting difficult issues.

This presidential election was supposed to be a layup for Democrats, what with the economy on its knees and McCain wearing the scarlet B (for George W. Bush) on his back. But the polls say it's close, McCain has momentum and a foreign policy crisis in the Russian-Georgian clash that may play to his strength. In other words, Obama could blow this layup.

Americans seems to like tough guys for president or at least guys who talk tough and provide terse answers that reduce complex issues to a clear-cut choice. That's what McCain offers. No equivocation for him. Obama ruminates, turning an issue over in his mind like a Rubik's Cube in search of a solution.

He's got intellectual depth that McCain may lack, but he lacks McCain's quick-trigger commitment on almost any issue.

Never was this contrast between the two men more evident than in the one-hour conversation each had over the weekend with the Rev. Rick Warren. (Incidentally, Warren put television's gotcha-happy anchors to shame with his conversational approach that had the candidates at ease and encouraged each to reveal something of himself and his thinking. Maybe it's time to bench the TV anchors in the debates this fall.)

Obama was nothing if not nuanced during his hour with Warren. Asked why he wanted to be president, he launched into a soliloquy on lessons he'd learned at his mother's lap.

"I was talking to somebody a while back," he began, "and I said the one time that she'd really get angry with me is if she ever thought that I was being mean to somebody or unfair to somebody." On another occasion, Obama said, she pointed out that in America "everybody's got a shot." He wants to be president, Obama concluded, because "I feel that American dream is slipping away."

McCain kept it short. He wants to be president, he said, "to inspire a generation of Americans to serve a greater cause than their self-interest." Period.

The general impression among the people who watch these things for a living is that McCain came out the winner. His crisp answers clearly won the audience. Democrats tend to discount his better reception, noting that the audience was dominated by Christian evangelicals friendly to Republicans. But that's cold comfort. The evangelicals are precisely the segment of the GOP base that, up to now, has been most skeptical of the old McCain, the maverick McCain.

If he has, in fact, made believers of the evangelicals, it's a substantial boost for the McCain candidacy.

But there's another downside for Obama in the Warren meeting -- the first inkling that he may not enjoy the advantage over McCain in this fall's debates that has been widely assumed in the press and inside his own camp.

McCain's feistiness suggests passion, and his crisp answers convey conviction. Obama, the intellectual like Stevenson, can see so many aspects of an issue that he seems passionless and less decisive. It's not a winning style. (Think Michael Dukakis.) If you'll recall, Hillary Clinton bested him in most of the debates during the Democratic primary fight.

Another aspect of the Obama style that frustrates some Democrats is his unwillingness to attack McCain even as McCain (or his handlers) hit Obama with everything in the ring but the corner stool. If Obama takes any more blows, he'll need a cut man in his corner.

It's hard to understand how Obama, a graduate of the Chicago school of politics as a contact sport, could seem so passionless, even passive at times. The reason, of course, is that his is a politics of ideas, not invective. Like Stevenson. But Stevenson, despite one of the most innovative, elevated and issue-dominated campaigns in the last half of the 20th century, lost by a rout in 1952.

He was running against an American military hero, too.

John Farmer may be reached at jfarmer@starledger.com. To comment on his column, go to NJVoices.com.