The Critique

If you wanted to make the case against Barack Obama, there are a few areas where there's an opening:

• On foreign policy, there's a question, as with Clinton (and Edwards!) as to what he means when he says he'll end the war in Iraq. Will we continue the training mission even as Iraqi soldiers kill US troops? Fight "Al-Qaeda in Iraq", which is primarily just a bunch of Sunni dudes pissed off at the occupation, and not some world-wide conspiracy to blow up the Rockefeller Center? Keep troops on bases far away from urban areas but not do much fighting? No one really knows, beyond a commitment not to install permanent military bases.
• On domestic policy, the obvious opening isn't guns or defendants' rights or whatever the small fry team Clinton is talking about: it's health care. Barack Obama's health care plan would leave fifteen million people out in the cold. As Ezra notes, he's even stopped promising universal health care on the stump. Clinton had AFSCME distributing flyers on this issue, but this is a legitimate criticism that you could put in a TV ad, not some petty personal attack about ambitions or the size of one's house or what-have-you.
• And on the theory of change, Edwards is obviously trying to make the case that a conciliatory approach to the drug companies, oil companies, and insurance companies just won't work; as he likes to say "if you give them a seat at the table, they will eat all the food".

Picking on Obama for his position on gun control or defendants' rights or whatever else you can muster is weak brew. But these are legitimate points about big themes for this year's Presidential election; there's no reason to let Obama get the nomination without at least defending his position.

Comments

[Trevor]

Obviously, Edwards is far better suited for making all these critiques. Clinton can only make the "too liberal" argument about Obama. If she tries to hit any of these bullets, he's rubber and she's glue:

Foreign policy? Kyl-Lieberman.

Domestic policy? Health care lobbyist dough.

Change? She doesn't want it.

[ikl]

Yeah, what Trevor said. Also neither Edwards or Clinton is going to attack on 1 - this is not a good subject for them in the Dem primary.

Gun control could be an important issue to some people in northern NH otherwise inclined to vote for Obama. It is also important for Obama to figure out how to occupy the center on this issue of the general election. Gun control really hurt Gore in rural areas in 2000.

[BruceMcF]

With respect to three of those foreign policy questions, we do have fairly clear answers from Clinton and Edwards.

"Will we continue the training mission even as Iraqi soldiers kill US troops?"

• Clinton: Yes
• Edwards: No

Fight "Al-Qaeda in Iraq", which is primarily just a bunch of Sunni dudes pissed off at the occupation, and not some world-wide conspiracy to blow up the Rockefeller Center?

• Clinton: Yes
• Edwards: Maybe, but not with forces based in Iraq

Keep troops on bases far away from urban areas but not do much fighting?

• Clinton: Yes
• Edwards: No

I'd prefer it if Edwards second answer was No, but then again Obama's answer seems to be "Maybe, maybe with forces inside Iraq, maybe not".

[Bruce Webb]

My critique on Obama is actually ongoing. His freely chosen economics team does not align with any authentically progressive program. These guys didn't come on board yesterday, Goolsbee of the U of Chi was giving him advice at least as early as 2004 (via George Will's article on him) and Social Security privatizer Jeffrey Liebman officially came on board in June.

Its a little difficult to tell chicken from egg here. Did Obama freely chose to take on this team because he liked what they had to say about issues like income inequality or social security? If so he is not really an economic progressive at all, whatever other good qualities he might have. If instead he started from a position that stressed economic justice and has simply been pulled back to the center by these guys for whatever reason, then you have to wonder about his commitment to start with, either that or his judgement.

The only change you are going to get out of this economic team is change backwards and until Obama explains his reasoning I am not going to get on board. If Obama were notably better on Iraq than the other two then I might be swayed. But he really isn't. I am a 51 year old policy wonk, content free appeals to generational change frankly leave me pretty cold. And where I do see fragments of policy content I don't like what I see.

As an example raising the cap on FICA is not progressive overall unless it goes right to the top and also takes an equivalent amount out of returns on capital. I don't know that Obama was fleshed out his version of a cap increase, but advisor Liebman sure has. His LMS plan simply raises the cap on wage earners up to the 90% level while one, giving them no actual benefit, and two giving the very wealthiest an effective free ride. What the plan seems to be trying to do is to drive a wedge between urban professionals (who lean Dem) making money between $100k and $200k by smacking them by 6.2% (pushing their combined marginal rate up to either 34.2% or 39.2%) and other wage workers. A cap increase in the context of the LMS plan is both regressive overall and a threat to the political support for Social Security among the more successful swaths of the middle class.

Has Obama bought into this backdoor assault on Social Security? Well we can't tell yet, but I am not prepared for the coronation until we get some more answers.

[BruceMcF]

If a social security "cap increase" does not yield any benefits, its not a cap increase, its a levy.

And if there is going to be a Social Security levy, then the levy suggested by Obama is to start the levy at $100,000 and push it as high as needed to reach 90% of income, and the levy suggested by Edwards is from $200,000 and up.

Given where the downward slide in effective tax incidence hits our "progressive for the middle class, regressive for the rich" system, clearly Edwards suggestion is a more progressive (in the technical sense) tax proposal.

[weboy]

Yeah, I think these are kind of obvious "objections" that have kind of asked and answered - Obama's health plan starts slow and builds they say; all three proposals - to the extent that an Edwards plan matters at this point - have flaws and none of them are likely will get in the near term anyway. The idea that Obama wants to talk to all sides as opposed to Edwards "stick it to the man" notion has always been rejected once, and will be, again, repeatedly. And on Iraq, there's really never been a lot of daylight between the main thre... if you want us out, now, that would be Kucinich.

No, the bigger questions I have about Obama are the ones he's not talking about - where is he on public housing? where he is on the mortgage crisis? where, really, is he planning to stake a position on racial justice issues (he neatly sidestepped Jena, but he won't get a lot more of those, if he stays a front runner)? What's he plan to do to reign in spending? And does he seriously plan to pursue these "revisions" to Social Security, when things are not broken?

There are questions to be asked about Obama - I don't think they're the questions that the Ewdards folks want to raise, and they're surely not the questions being lobbed by the Clintons from their defensive crouch. Until we separate being critical of Obama from the fact that he's a black man running for President (i.e. questioning him is suggesting one is prejudiced), we may not get any questions at all. And that's not necessarily the worst thing... but it may mean a few surprises if and when he wins.

[lux]

w/r/t "change" -- it's utterly unrealistic to say that you're going to be able to implement substantive change to areas like health insurance by completely ignoring drug and insurance companies. Anyone who has ever had to create or implement change in an organization knows that a change effort is doomed to failure unless you have buy-in from everyone who is going to be involved in implementing the changes you want to make.

So when I hear candidates saying that they won't even talk to insurance companies, it make me respect those candidates less, not more.

[Nicholas Beaudrot]

But there's no reason to start from the premise that you need to compromise. It's Lucy, Charlie Brown, and the football all over again.

[Lisa Simeone]

I don't know -- isn't compromise the very nature of politics? I suppose it all comes down to the degree of compromise.

[lux]

Nicholas -- I'm sorry, but you're wrong. Compromise is not optional.

Here's an example: the spam wars. There have been plenty of folks over the last 10+ years who've proposed the "ultimate" solution to the problem of e-mail spam. The only problem was, those solutions would require 99.99% of the Internet changing how they already handled their e-mail. No surprise, all of those solutions got absolutely no real-world traction. The spam solutions that have worked best have been those that accepted the fact that there's a range of existing mail services out there and that companies have invested a lot of time and effort into their current solutions. Solutions that work with, not against, market reality have a much better chance of actually creating change.

So too with politics. Pretending that the slate can be wiped clean without any involvement of the current players, especially for complex problems like climate change and health care, is naive and doomed to failure. You cannot tell organizations that represent the bulk of services as they are already being provided today 'you are so wrong that you are not even allowed to be a part of the conversation' and then expect that you will succeed in creating change.

Think about it. Say you're the CEO of Blue Cross and you're locked out of the discussion for health care reform. What are you going to do? You'll do your damnedest to sabotage the entire process. How does that help things?

[Dave]

They dropped the mandate critique in NH because it wasn't working; Dem voters ended up being on Obama's side of the argument, and highlighting a contrast with someone when you're on the unpopular side of that argument doesn't seem like an effective electoral strategy.