The Calculations of Barack Obama
Barack Obama the nave sapling is out, replaced – for the time being at least – by a different caricature: the cunning opportunist, wrapping himself in the mantle of reform in ruthless and amoral pursuit of the White House.
The image began taking hold in the media last week, when Obama rationalized his way out of a previous commitment to make a good faith effort at participating in the public financing system for the general election.
Given his earlier cutesiness on Nafta, his now-infamous 130 “present” votes in the Illinois legislature and his penchant for blaming his staff for his own mistakes, the campaign funding flap could serve as a tipping point in the media’s portrayal of Obama. Something very similar happened to Jimmy Carter at this same point in his victorious 1976 campaign, when a media that had watched his stunning run through the Democratic primaries with fascination and awe suddenly began demanding specificity.
…“Even Bill Clinton,” David Brooks wrote in a widely-distributed column last week, “wasn’t smart enough to succeed in politics by pretending to renounce politics.”
Perhaps Clinton didn’t, but Carter certainly did. In his 1976 campaign, Carter presented himself very much like Obama does now, as a unifying post-partisan reformer bursting onto the scene to rescue a dispirited country from deep political, cultural, and ethnic polarization. Carter carried himself as the second coming of Jimmy Stewart’s Mr. Smith, a simple, honest peanut farmer from Georgia as outraged and bewildered as the rest of America at the ways of Washington. His platform was rooted in feelings, not a laundry list of policy proposals.
“I’ll never lie to you,” Carter promised a country still recovering from Watergate.
In reality, Carter and his campaign were anything but wide-eyed nafs. He had set his eyes on the presidency years earlier and set out to run while the 1972 campaign was still going on. Guided by his young aide Hamilton Jordan, Ca