If you will allow me a personal moment, I will say the following: I prayed today, in my role as a supplicant before God on the first day of the Jewish New Year, not only for my family and my people and all mankind, but also for my country—which, I declare in unison with Abraham Lincoln, indeed is “the last best hope of earth.”
Besides prayer, another good move in times like these is to get outside of the Beltway.
I did that the other day, when I flew to Mississippi for the first presidential debate. America’s troubles and challenges do not look so bleak or insoluble when viewed from a place where people talk slow, the land matters, and profits depend on making or growing things, or, as at Ole Miss, on educating a hopeful new generation.
I’m thinking about all of this—about renewal, real life and new beginnings—as I consider the state of the presidential race, which I have been covering for close to two years. As I do so, I can see where Barack Obama is coming from—if not where he is going to.
His key words are hope, change and belief. And the only real question in this election, ever since that gelid, sun-drenched morning in Springfield, Ill., on which it started, is whether this man will strive (so far as we can tell) to live up to the inspirational words he utters and the grand possibilities his roots and rising embody.
In the story line of this campaign, John McCain is secondary. People want change; they want to roll the dice, to paraphrase Bill Clinton. The only question is whether they can trust Obama to do so.
So he is trying—not always succeeding, but trying—to be a calm, measured and trustworthy character; the kind who sees the world whole and sees it clearly; who knows history and has perspective; whose vessel won’t capsize easily.
That is why, even though McCain won the first debate on debating points, Obama profited more from the entire tableau. Did he say one or two too many times that he agreed with his foe on this issue or that one? Sure. Did that conciliatory tendency make Obama look weak? Not really. He was trying to look amenable.
Now comes the “$700 billion bailout,” which was misnamed and mismanaged into at least temporary oblivion by everyone closely associated with it, from Hank Paulson (who thought he was doing a secret leveraged buyout) to congressional leaders to President Bush, who should not have cried havoc in the cabinet room.
The Paulson Plan is not great. Some two hundred academic economists have ridiculed it, and so have the House Republicans, by a 2-1 margin. Public opinion (and not just the angry phone callers) is turning against the measure—to the extent that anybody understands it.
But the consensus is that Washington has to do something, and that the current version is far better than what the lawmakers started with.
McCain made a show of returning to Washington to try to jam the original measure through. He deserves credit for the instinct. An old Navy motto is: Don’t just stand there, DO something! That is McCain to the core, and so much the better for it.
But when he got to town, he realized something that no one had bothered to tell him, apparently: the grassroots of his own party (the grassroots that has never really trusted him) hated the Paulson Plan. They weren’t about to support it and risk their own necks. McCain worked the phones, but fell back in the ranks.
Obama, by contrast, is trying to emerge in the role as Restorer of Order—the deal-doer and peacemaker, the one who can bring hope by listening to everyone and working with anyone.
He was more cautious by first instinct; that is who he is. But he made two moves to help push the deal forward. One was to say early and loudly that he opposed including in the plan a provision to give bankruptcy judges more power to ease the terms of home mortgages. As a lawyer and a “South Side liberal,” that is something he should have been willing to go to the mat for. He wasn’t.
Obama also decided not to make his support conditional on the channeling of funds to “neighborhood” and other grassroots housing groups. Again, that is something, given his own background, you would expect him to favor.
In both cases, Obama was more interested in seeing the deal get done than in currying favor with his own base.
Why? Well, one reason is that he is pretty solid with that base at this point, so he can afford to maneuver a bit. Another is that he has been advised (by folks such as Larry Summers, the former Clinton treasury secretary) that the plan, as it has been amended, may indeed help to restore liquidity to the credit markets.
But above all Obama wants to portray himself as a calm and steady force—someone who, as his slogan says, offers “change we can believe in.”
Is he really that guy? Does he really offer a season of hope and renewal? The voters have a little more than a month to decide their answer.
