David Ignatius has a very odd column in tomorrow's WaPo. An excerpt:
"Why is the press going so easy on Barack Obama?" asks a prominent Democratic Party strategist, echoing a criticism frequently made by the Clinton campaign. It's a fair question, and now that Obama appears to be the front-runner in terms of his delegate count, he deserves a closer look, especially from people like me who have written positively about him.
The reason to look closely now, quite simply, is to avoid buyer's remorse later.Obama is a phenomenon in American politics -- a candidate who has ignited an enthusiasm among young people that I haven't seen in decades. He promises a nation in which, as his supporters chant, "race doesn't matter." And for a world that is dangerously alienated from American leadership, he offers a new face that could dispel negative assumptions about America -- and in that sense boost the nation's standing and security.
But these are symbolic qualities. What Obama would actually do as president remains a mystery in too many areas. Before he completes what increasingly looks like a march to the Democratic nomination, Obama needs to clarify more clearly what lies behind the beguiling banner marked "change."
So I'm reading this and thinking, "here we go again." Obama's got more policy content on his website than any single human being has the time to read. He's even published a downloadable PDF called "A Blueprint for Change" that sets out how all of these various proposals fit together. So yeah, I was reading this and thinking, "one click down from his homepage is apparently one click too far for Ignatius." Except...
Let's start with Obama's economic policies. Like all the major candidates, he has a Web site brimming with plans and proposals. But it has been hard to tell how these different strands come together. Is Obama a "New Democrat," in the tradition of Bill Clinton, who would look skeptically at traditional welfare programs? Is he a neopopulist, in the style of his former rival John Edwards, who would make job protection and tax equity his top domestic priorities? Or is he a technocrat, whose economic answers wouldn't be all that different from those of Hillary Clinton?
I'm still puzzled about where to locate Obama on this policy map. Until the past few weeks, I would have put him somewhere between "New Democrat" and "technocrat." But as he reaches for votes in big industrial states, Obama has been sounding more like Edwards. He proposed a middle-class tax cut a few months ago that would provide a credit of up to $1,000 per family. That's a big policy change that deserves real debate.
The problem for Ignatius isn't that he's unaware of Obama's policies. It is that he doesn't know which label to apply label them. Or something. God I hate our news media.
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