In reply to my post on Obama's fuzziness, Dave White writes:
As Marc Ambinder pointed out not long ago, Obama's never claimed to be a policy radical, his biggest and most radical accomplishments to date (Coburn-Obama, Feingold-Obama, Death Penalty reform in Illinois, etc.) have all been process oriented. He's a process radical, with big ideas about good government reforms.
And that's not to say his policy isn't pretty good either, just that the boldness of his rhetoric is more in line with what he sees as great potential for government when government works properly. His claim to the nomination, thus, revolves more around his abilities to strengthen the way government works, such that a liberal wish-list of policy proposals (often involving more government interaction) can more easily be implemented. He's going to radically fix the process such that the more modest (yet necessary) policy can be better implemented.
That's fair. But what's the meat of it? Will he erase the filibuster? Simply set a new tone? What worries me about his emphasis on procedure is that I can't tell how this better politics comes into being. Too much seems to depend on Obama's capability to use his own talents, tenor, and aptitudes to lead by example. That makes sense, as much in Obama's past -- from his time on the Harvard Law Review, to his experience in Democratic politics -- has suggested that that's possible for him to do so. But on the presidential level, I don't buy it. That said, maybe he's suggesting procedural ideas that I'm missing.
And incidentally, I want to say that these posts aren't an attack on Obama. At this point, I'm genuinely an undecided voter, and at times, I lean towards him, largely because I believe his foreign policy instincts to be far superior to the rest of the field. But much about his campaign does leave me puzzled, and I'm trying to work through it.
