Campaign Desk

Seeing the Light in South Carolina

In the flesh, Obama is easy…maybe too easy

By Gal Beckerman Fri 25 Jan 2008 04:27 PM 

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I read the New York Times endorsement of Hillary Clinton late last night in my hotel room in Columbia, South Carolina. I’d just driven back from attending a Barack Obama event 120 miles south in the gym of North Charleston High School (“Home of the Cougars!”). It was everything everyone said it would be, more like a revival than a political event. Even though Obama was an hour and a half late, the largely African-American crowd’s enthusiasm did not wane. People stamped their feet. Two little girls got up on stage and led the crowd in a chant of Obama’s name. The local field coordinator, Kevin, a short white guy with glasses and a goatee, got so excited that even his warm-up speech sounded southern fried. “We’ve been told too many times to wait,” he screamed. “That our time had not yet come!” Another speaker, stalling for time, mistakenly referred to the senator as “Bomrock Obrama” and was nearly driven from the gym by the booing, restless audience. When the senator did arrive, he gave a pitch-perfect stump speech, surfing the enthusiasm of the pulsating gym. When he took the stage he said, “At some point in the evening, a light is going to shine down and you will have an epiphany and you’ll say, ‘I have to vote for Barack.’”

If that epiphany never came, you couldn’t blame Obama. I’m not sure what more he could have done to make those people see the light.

Still, when I got back to my hotel room and read the Times’s assessment of the Democratic field, I realized that the editorial board understood something the rest of us consumers of daily media have missed, but which was obvious to me after just one Obama-in-the-flesh event: what the Illinois senator excels at is packaging himself for the press (and, consequently, the public).

I imagined, seeing him speak in person for the first time, that I would hear more of a discussion of policy than I’ve heard in the coverage of his campaign. I was sure that the sound bites that his stump speech produced about unity and change may pepper his talk, but could not possibly be the sum total of his message. But, basically, they were. There was very little sense that he was standing in North Charleston talking to a specific community of people. His transcendent talk was just that, transcendent. It’s not that this didn’t have a strong effect on the people who had waited to see him. It did. But there was something slightly gimmicky about his presentation. In my notebook, I wrote twice, “How will he make change?”

I looked around me, though, as I was at once emotionally stimulated and intellectually underwhelmed, and saw the press corps, yawning, checking e-mail, and one older, bespectacled man who looked like he was working on a chapter of his book. (What would you do if you had to listen to the same anecdotes and promises hundreds of times?) It occurred to me that Obama’s message was easy to encapsulate, could be boiled down to a very distinct nut graph. And his success, at least in the press, seemed to me very much the result of this convergence of time-pressed journalists’ need to tell a succinct story and Obama’s ability to deliver it. It seemed a perfect marriage. And even if many of the reporters look bored, pale, and poorly fed, he was making their job easy.

The Times endorsement listed the range of issues the next president had to confront and then said of Obama, “…we need more specifics to go with his amorphous promise of a new governing majority, a clearer sense of how he would govern.” This is not a line I would have necessarily accepted so readily before experiencing Obama last night. Is it because the daily press coverage, unlike the editorial board’s more luxurious contemplation, has muted this critical question, of which candidate has the ability to handle the presidency?

If last night made me realize that the press had maybe let Obama himself define too much how he is depicted, then this morning, at an event for Hillary Clinton at a chapel at Benedict College in Columbia, made me see how difficult it has been for her to make her case in the media. While Obama entered his event almost as if he were being lowered from the ceiling, Clinton ambled onto the stage with almost no fanfare at all. Suddenly she was just there, and there was a smattering of applause from the audience, composed mostly of African-American students from the school. The press sat in the balcony, suspended above the scene, and, still, seeming pretty disinterested. CNN’s Candy Crowley spent the entire event on her Blackberry. Clinton was book ended by Charlie Rangel and David Dinkins, and both tried to make the case for voting for—as councilwoman Bernice Scott (recently featured in a Wall Street Journal article) put it—“our community’s future and not our emotions.”

It was a hard sell. The young woman next to me was wearing an Obama sticker. But Clinton then did her wonky thing. She listed about two-dozen specific plans that were tailored for this audience of college students. She spoke of lowering interest rates for student loans, of dealing with predatory lending, of letting students excuse their debt if they took part in national service (which got the loudest applause). She knew whom she was talking to. There was little of the electricity I had felt the night before. Her argument was methodical, an accumulation of details. His was immediate, almost existential.

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Comments

monicalee

Sat 26 Jan 2008 11:58 AM

Thanks so much for this piece. It's exactly what I'm hearing more and more from disillusioned Obama fans. He is, as we feared, all talk and no substance. Even if the talk is electrifying, even if he sounds more and more like MLK every day, even if he appears--and is--young and bright and well, NICE, he eventually has to sound like the candidate who is the perfect antidote to the destructive Bush years.
In another time, when the country wasn't in such terrible trouble, his message might have resounded, and he might have had a chance. But reality strikes, and our uneasiness comes from the realization that, while we talk a good game about not wanting another Washington insider, we just may need such a person to get us out of this.
Barack is untested. He flinches when he should jab, and flails around for the upper cut that he’s too inexperienced to administer. He gets his feelings hurt and whines, and instead of rising above it with just the facts, he falls into the victim trap.
I had to laugh at the idea of Candy Crowley busy on her Blackberry. Candy is a Bush Girl, through and through. She must have done something really bad to have been thrown to the Dems on the campaign trail. This is her penance, and it shows.

TDC

Sat 26 Jan 2008 10:27 PM

Why Gal, are you blushing? You certainly should be after yet another “Gal hearts Hillary” suck up piece. Whatever will you do when her campaign melts down? Mabey start a non-competitive dodgeball league like you had at Adat Ari El Day School?

CarolinaLiberal

Mon 28 Jan 2008 07:34 PM

Ms. Beckerman must have been confused. Obama was giving a stump speech to inspire potential supporters and energize his base.

He wasn't addressing the Council on Foreign Relations or some other group of "serious inside-the-beltway thinkers."

His speech has evolved, also. He's including a more specifics but giving a wonkish lecture to a campaign rally is a waste.

Want to know specifics and positions? Go to his website. Want to see how the candidate relates to you? Go to a campaign rally.

Maybe Ms. Beckerman will be lucky and get a sophomore poli sci prof who can explain the process in more depth.

JDS

Mon 28 Jan 2008 11:56 PM

This is a disappointing article. Like a previous post mentioned, a rally is NOT the place to get policy. Anyone interested enough to complain about not knowing his specifics should check out his website. This piece really was a waste of time to write or read. I only hope it does not turn anyone way from learning more about the most exceptional candidate we have had an opportunity to elect in my (long) lifetime. Put me in the category with those who have not been this impressed with anyone since John Kennedy.

monicalee

Tue 29 Jan 2008 08:18 AM

I was just barely of voting age when JFK came along, and I voted for him. Yes, he was a breath of fresh air, saying all the right things and looking GOOD while he said them. We Democrats were thrilled to have him representing us, and I've never regretted my vote.

But times were different then. We are in desperate trouble now, from all fronts. Everything has fallen apart and we are in such a mess, I don't see how we can ever get out of it without much wiser heads prevailing. We're in a protracted war that is draining us. We're in a recession that is fast becoming a depression. We're falling behind in wages, in health care, in infrastructure, in our stature in the world.

Our morale needs strengthening, to be sure, and that's the button Obama is pushing. We feel better when we hear him speak, often forgetting that he is merely mortal. He is untried, untested, and cannot possibly do it on his own. The jackals in Washington will do everything they can to tear him to shreds, and my fear is that they will succeed.
JFK faced nothing even close to what we're facing today. We could afford to indulge our need to bring in fresh, good looking blood. It was fun, let's face it.
I've said before that my own choice today would be the populist candidate, John Edwards, but that has gone by the wayside. He is, in fact, the most like JFK.

I like Obama--or I should say, I like the IDEA of Obama. But if Hillary is the candidate, I have to believe she'll bring the brightest minds back into the fold. Those same bright minds that gave us eight years of relative prosperity when her husband was in office. I have to believe that her toughness is what is scaring the bejeesus out of her enemies. Granted, Bill is doing nothing to endear her to the hearts and minds of American people, but her toughness, her resilience, her intelligence cannot be denied.

That said, I'll support the candidate my party ultimately chooses. I'm not sure that either Hillary or Obama can survive the Republican hate machine. It's obvious from the numbers the media hate mongers still draw that making nice is not on anyone's agenda.

I think our chances are just slightly better with Hillary, simply because they've tried so desperately to bring her down and so far she's still standing.

TGM

Tue 29 Jan 2008 01:32 PM

Rather than affirming or elucidating the misguided NYTimes endorsement, perhaps Gal Beckerman ought to pay more attention to the candidates. Instead of fostering the creation of an artificial image
of experience that Hillary Clinton cultivates, Beckerman would benefit us in refraining from engaging in overly simplistic characterizations of thoughtful, public performance. Suffice to say that although I
found an Obama rally wanting policy detail, I did not immediately conclude that Hillary Clinton lacks substance. Such easy remarks may be better suited within the confines of a personal blog.

GalBeckerman

Tue 29 Jan 2008 04:01 PM

It seems that some of the commenters have missed my point. I was not, in fact, trying to offer reasons for supporting either Obama or Clinton. I went down to South Carolina so that I could get an unfiltered view of the candidates. I'm not personally inclined towards one or the other. I just wanted to see how they presented themselves in the flesh and not after being spun by TV pundits or in newspaper columns. What I recorded above were my impressions and not--as I tried to make clear--an endorsement.

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