First things first... Clinton showed that she can attack without looking mean or sounding shrill. And Obama that... well... I heard he was great at Harvard Mock Trial.
Whatever you want to say about Obama’s performance in tonight’s debate – awkward, lackluster, masochistic, punching-bag-esque… - it faithfully delivered the point that he’s manically pursued throughout the campaign. Namely:
I’m not playing your game.
Obama’s rhetoric – lampooned by Clinton as just a little too beautiful, just a little too authentic – operates on the level of what’s good in us, not what we fear or what our parochial views incline us toward. The latest conflagration over Barack’s San Francisco remarks is the Obama style writ large. Instead of knocking back a shot or donning a hard-hat for a photo-shoot, he addressed Pennsylvania seriously… foot-in-mouth serious, but serious nonetheless.
So, back to the debate, it shouldn’t surprise that Obama didn’t make the big political counter-punches on Hillary’s authenticity that the situation demanded. When the moderators brought up Hillary's serial misspeak on Bosnia, Clinton offered up that she hadn't gotten much sleep (possibility due to 3:00am phone-calls?) Obama did nothing to pursue her on the fact that she didn't just 'misspeak', she did it on at least three occasions. When Hillary was waxing poetic on her working-class roots, Obama didn't hit back with the fact that she grew up in privileged circumstances in an affluent Chicago suburb.
He gave his answers, not the right answers. When questioned on the “bitterness” comment, he described communities in this country that lost their economic raison d’etre 30 years ago and have lingered on since then fed on the Democratic Party’s starvation diet of empty populism; communities that have fallen back on those traditions that still give there togetherness meaning, religion and guns. When questioned on his… er… outspoken Minister, he repeated his old line. The Church had a profoundly positive ministry and he does not support the views of Rev. Wright.
Lame.
Obama also talked about transcending these issues and about how they were side shows. Good point, but this time his words truly fell short of his message. It’s all fine and good to talk about transcendence, but you need to show us that new world if you want to shatter the old paradigm. He did that in his “Major Speech on Race”, but today, he choked.
The trouble with attempting such a gambit in a debate is that transcendence takes time. It takes a speech like the one he delivered in Philly after the Rev. Wright issue turned into a media orgy, or his religion speech in 2006, or his 2004 Convention speech, or his “Yes, We Can” speech...etc. He’s used these speeches to move us beyond the sound bite and thus succeed in inverted Hillary’s attacks into a symbol of her own Rovian campaign tactics. His strong, non-violent responses have turned people irresistibly back to the image of Hillary as the Machiavellian attacker (no disrespect to Mackie).
But in the final analysis he just couldn’t get there; he needed to have more than weak excuses and repetition of previous remarks – however true those remarks were – to turn the momentum of Clinton’s aggression back upon her.
Obama needed to take the elitism remarks as an opportunity to say “I take you seriously.” To say “I’m talking to you like an adult rather than trying to manipulate you with images of shooters and hard-hat photo shoots.”
He needed to use the “he wouldn’t have been my pastor” attack to say “Rev. Wright was the pastor of my community, a community that I love and have chosen to work through.”
To say “We can’t wait for perfection or the mythic leader we agree with completely before we put our shoulders to the wheel. Just as we can’t wait for America to be the America want and to have the leaders she needs before we pull together to make her truly beautiful.”
Why not? This is what the left has always needed – less “American baaaahd” and more commitment to America as a common project.
Obama doesn’t need to retreat into the old manipulative language of politics to win. He needs to go deeper into his strength: speaking to me and you like we are adults. If he wins this nomination, I hope he will look back on this debate and remember that what America needs – though perhaps she has not learn to want it yet – is an end to condescending sound-bite, image politics (the rhetoric of domination.)
Full Post
First things first... 
