Look who's on the cover of GQ Magazine?
A few thoughts based on a few excerpts....
As Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, told me, “There are a lot of people who believe that he was born on that stage in Boston.” The contrast between the image of Obama at the height of his rhetorical powers and the slight and professorial candidate they meet in person can be jarring for many people.
When Obama came to BU a few months back, I got to the arena early enough to get a spot on the floor up near the front. I chose the side of the stage with fewer people, and as I soon discovered I had accidentally planted myself right next to the walkway connecting backstage to the front of the house. When Obama finally came out I got a chance to shake his hand, and I'll be honest - I know heguy constantly makes jokes about being "a skinny kid with a funny name," but however skinny you've imagined him, he's even smaller than that. And jarring is the precisely the word for it; given the way he can control a room, you just don't expect him to be so slight.
Here's a second phenomenon I noticed myself falling prey to:
“The first couple of months,” he said, “if I didn’t bring somebody to tears during a speech, people said, ‘You know what? The guy’s not as inspiring as we thought he was.’ ” Part of what he’s been trying to do, Obama explained, is to actually lower expectations, to turn Barack Obama, celebrity politician, into Barack Obama, serious and sober candidate for president.
Obama was good the night that I saw him, but he wasn't epic, and I left the arena a bit disappointed. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized how ridiculous my disappointment was. Which led me to an important connection: when you're giving a speech, you're giving a performance. It doesn't matter if it is a political speech or a soliloquy from Shakespeare, it is a performance. You've got to own the stage, connect with the audience, and transport them somewhere else. And in that sense it is not all that different from DJing. When you show up at the club, people aren't just expecting you to take them somewhere else, they are demanding it. They've paid their money, and they are there to see you, so no excuses if you are off! Every night - each and every single night - you've got to be on.
But that is of course impossible. No human being can be that on every time they step out on stage. It just cannot be done. But of course you can't blame the audience for their expectations. They paid good money to see you, and this may be the only time they ever get to see you live. Add to that the fact that this might be the only chance they get to go out and relax all week, and well... their expectations make sense, don't they?
It's good to see that Obama recognized this phenomenon so early. I've wondered why he has been keeping such a low profile all summer, and I now suspect this might the answer. But that answer begs a new question: when the time comes, will he be able to turn it back on at will? The 2004 convention speech suggests that he can. The question, I guess, is whether or not he will be able to find the right platform.
More:
“Movement without organization,” he says, “without policy, without plans, will dissipate. Howard Dean, one could argue, back in 2004 helped to engineer a movement, a movement in opposition to the war. But there wasn’t a structure there and a set of policies and plans that would then lead to governance.”
He leans forward and becomes more animated as he speaks. “One of the dangers of movements is that they always want to be completely pure and have everything their way. But politics is about governing and making compromises. And so sometimes folks who come into politics with a movement mentality can be disappointed.”As I listen, I realize I have never witnessed a politician so genuinely trying to fuse idealism and pragmatism. The theme runs through almost everything he says. “But the flip side of it is,” he explains, hinting at what divides him and Hillary, “if it’s all tactics and all politics, and there’s not the idealism, if it’s not touched by that sense of movement, then you actually never bring about change. Then it’s just pure transactions between powerful interests in Washington.”
If the last part brought out the DJ in me, this one definitely brings out the PoliSci geek. It's not just that Obama has worked in movements; its that he understands them on a theoretical level as well. The dilemma that he's describing here is one of the most complicated questions for those involved in movements. Unless carefully managed movements tend to purify themselves, becoming more and more idealistic as time goes on. Eventually this idealism becomes so inflexible - and dare I say it, unreasonable? - that the movement becomes more about individual identity than social change. When a movement becomes a statement of who you are, rather than what we hope to get a wider community to do, compromise becomes unthinkable. And given that modern democratic politics is all about the art of compromise, well...
The flipside of this is, as Obama points out, transactional politics. At the other extreme you can become so focused on accomplishing things that you forget the values that brought you into politics in the first place. Compromising on the details of policy is an unavoidable part of politics, but compromising on values shouldn't be. Done correctly, politics isn't just about what happens in DC. It's about getting the people outside of the Beltway behind your vision, marshaling their power to force your political opponents in DC to do most of the compromising. But people don't rally behind policies, they rally behind ideas, and ideas at their core are almost always motivated by values. If your goal is to truly transform the political conversation, that can never be forgotten.
Last but not lest... as no blog post is complete without a complaint about the way a story was written, I've got to take issue with one thing. It's a minor thing here, I'll admit, but I see it often enough in political reporting that I feel like I need to take issue with it. After describing a speech Obama delivered to a group of seniors at a senior center - one where he described "in excruciating detail his plan to reduce their drug costs" - Lizza says this:
I am either witnessing the total trivialization of the only inspiring politician in America or just another shrewd political play by someone whose granular understanding of electoral politics is constantly underestimated. Or maybe both.
I'd love to know what precisely is trivializing about explaining to a group of interested citizens your specific plans to make their lives better. I have no doubt the moment wasn't inspirational. But trivializing? Maybe Lizza thought the speech was trivial, but I suspect the seniors sitting in their wheelchairs (Lizza's observation, not mine) didn't find it trivial at all. And given that it was the seniors that were the intended audience for the speech, I'm not all that sure why Lizza focused on his response rather than theirs.
Anyway, as you'd expect with a cover story, the article is quite long, but its well worth your time. GQ notes that this is their first political cover since 1992. Since, you know... the last time the Dems took the White House from the GOP. Let's hope this is the start of a streak.
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