Thinking about Obama's "I have understood you" mode of communication and its possibility to create greater disillusionment when he ends up disagreeing nevertheless, Matt says, "That sounds to me like the kind of thing a liberal would have said before getting pummeled by Ronald Reagan. Realistically, the number of people who have any awareness of 'actual policymaking' is pretty tiny and I think most people mostly want to stay in the dark. People want to put in office people who they feel understand them and then forget about it." I think that's right on Reagan and wrong on Obama. Obama is very good at making policy-oriented, intellectuals feel understood. This is why David Brooks, Andrew Sullivan, Charles Murray, and a variety of other conservatives evince such affection for the guy. As we're seeing in the primaries, however, Obama is not nearly so good at the Ronald Reagan/Bill Clinton/Mike Huckabee trick of conveying empathy to low-information voters. This is, in part, because that's a trick related to identity politics, and it's hard for Obama to tap into the peculiar cultural signifiers and anxieties of downscale whites in the way that Reagan and Clinton and Huckabee, all of whom were born downscale whites, were able to. Obama's empathy is of a more cerebral variety -- he understands your ideas, gets the theory behind your mistrust of government, is familiar with concerns about the breakdown of the American family, etc. This may end up serving him well, as the universe of "actual policymakers," though small, is the universe of folks who pass your bills, and so a connection with them can't hurt. And Obama's rhetorical gifts -- which are more aspirational and inspirational than they are empathetic -- have certainly stood him in good stead thus far. So it may all be fine. But insofar as most Americans aren't very policy oriented, that's going to hurt, rather than help, with Obama's trick.
