Obama is the RFK of this election cycle. Like Howard Dean and Bill Bradley, he’s the darling of both ideological purists (i.e., limousine liberals) and those who want a charismatic figure to save us from politics (soccer moms and young people). I must confess, he’s pretty good at this schtick. I certainlydon’t viscerally dislike Obama the way I do, say, Hillary or that nut job from Alaska.
I thought Larison explained his appeal quite accurately in the remarks below:
Obama’s gift is to make what is otherwise obviously an aggressive rhetorical move seem completely inoffensive and almost boring. It doesn’t sound like the sort of “red meat” denunciations that partisans want to hear, but it is all the more politically dangerous for conservatives because of that. With perfunctory nods to the importance of family and personal responsibility, his God-talk and his rhetoric of American unity, Obama smuggles his very progressive record past those sentries who are always on the lookout for the next big left-winger. People who somehow found the eminently centrist Howard Dean to be a scary and unhinged zealot find the genuinely left-wing Obama charming and amiable and (here’s the key word) unthreatening. Thus, in the bizarre estimations of many Republicans, Hillary Clinton, the embodiment of DLC centrism and cynical difference-splitting, supposedly represents the radical left who will tear the country apart even more, while Obama represents a less polarising and more broadly appealing kind of politics, yet he is objectively to the left of everyone in the Democratic field (except on the war) aside from Dennis Kucinich and perhaps the current, latest incarnation of John Edwards. Conservatives said of Dean, “Please nominate this man,” because they assumed a landslide victory for their side would follow. Now, strangely, conservatives seem to be getting concerned that the Republican nominee will have to face Obama, even though this would probably represent the GOP’s best chance at political salvation.
Obama also loves the device of invoking the line, “There are those who say…,” setting up the nameless, faceless opposition that he can characterise as he pleases, and now he has Oprah uttering the same kinds of remarks on his behalf. Both men (i.e., Obama and Bush) have a habit of putting words in the mouths of their critics, and they enjoy evading criticism by ridiculing the credibility of the critic without addressing the merits of the criticism.
