Above is Barack Obama’s first television ad of the general election season. Even by the lenient standards by which such things are judged, it’s a real snooze. It also seems like an odd sort of retreat. The sum total of the message is that Obama is a humble son of the heartland, imbued with the good old-fashioned Kansas values that his mother and grandparents had. They didn’t have much money, by the way. I guess this spot represents something of a tactical retreat from the Hope/Change stuff. Obama wants you to know that he’s just like you and shares your values. One comment struck me as odd in the spot. Obama referred to what guided him while “work(ing) my way up.” Hmmm. This is an area where things get kind of dicey in the Obama biography. Obama graduated law school in 1991 and spent the next dozen years stuck in professional mud. He started as a community organizer, a job whose details he famously can’t explain, and showed no discernible career progress. Given his obvious intelligence and even obviouser ambition, you would think that the community Obama organized would have been the most organized damn community in America. And yet, tangible accomplishments in this regard are difficult to pin down. Before he launched his 2004 senate campaign, Obama had settled in to three part time jobs – one in a law firm, one as a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School (although his campaign retroactively promoted him to “professor” there) and the other in the Illinois state legislature. Whatever material comforts he and his family enjoyed prior to becoming a national celebrity resulted from his wife’s far more gainful employment. Usually one refers to “working my way up” to identify career progress. But where’s the progress? I point this out not merely to be the turd in Obama’s getting-to-know-you punchbowl. There’s a serious point here. When Al Gore endorsed Obama the other day, he blusteringly recalled all the insulting things John F. Kennedy’s opponents said about him and his lack of experience when JFK sought the presidency. But compared to Barack Obama, Kennedy looks like a letter-day Cicero. In addition to being a war hero, Kennedy had been in congress for 14 years prior to the 1960 presidential election. He had also settled on a solid and discernible political philosophy. Kennedy could do more than express beautiful sentiments regarding hope and change because he had immersed himself in serious stuff before running for president. There’s no evidence, flimsy or solid, that Obama has done the same. Kennedy also wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning book on topical matters, or at least he had an aide write a Pulitzer Prize winning book on topical matters which is the next best thing. Obama’s lack of heft and accomplishment in his adult life isn’t necessarily a political Achilles Heel. After all, the guy who won the last two presidential elections hadn’t exactly spent the previous decades setting the world on fire. But usually in politics, accomplishments are a shorthand that communicate where a candidate stands. John McCain, to take one obvious example, has shepherded numerous bills to law and led a previous life of valor that give some indication of how he would govern. As is ever the case with Obama, all we have to go on to predict what kind of president he’ll be is some dashing yet extremely vague rhetoric.
