He Might Ruin The Place!?!

I'm not sure if I was more surprised or appalled to see Kevin Drum quote approvingly this passage from a rather silly Sally Quinn column:

The biggest problem that Obama has is this: We don't know who he is. Who are his people? Whom does he surround himself with? Whom does he listen to? Who gives him advice? He's so new to the national political scene that he hasn't had time to choose the team that would be with him in the White House. The more we see him in action, he's still just campaigning. He still has the quality of an unknown. And as attractive and likable as Obama is, we still need references.

Kevin goes deep on this paragraph, complaining that Dreams From My Father didn't give him a real sense of Obama, but the next paragraph indicates that Quinn's issue is that she doesn't know enough about his advisory team. Indeed, the way it's written strongly implies that Obama doesn't have a staff, or that who's on it is secret. But as Reed Hundt points out this is totally wrong:

Actually there have been dozens of articles about his team, including discussions of his economic advisers, fundraisers, experienced and capable Senate staff, and others. Just in terms of policy alone, a friend of mine, Karen Kornbluh, happens to be his chief policy director in the Senate office. Matt Alexander, otherwise a professor of law at Seton Hall, is his campaign policy director.

One could add Austin Goolsbee on economics, Samantha Power and Susan Rice on national security issues, etc. I have this sneaking suspicion that Quinn's objection is that she doesn't know Obama personally. She's willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, but he "need[s] references" -- people she knows personally. Quinn's job in this scheme, is to pass judgment on political figures based on her personally familiarity either with them or with his or her key "references" at which point the voters go along meekly with her choice.

Note also that totally missing in her column is the customary -- and at least somewhat apt! -- complaint that Obama has said enough about actual policy issues since, of course, policy is for losers and serious analysts rely on the social register (or something) to make their choices.

UPDATE: Kevin says he didn't mean to endorse Quinn's argument but, rather, to reach a similar conclusion based on his reading of Obama's book. My reading was more simply that Obama can't do a certain sort of writing all that well, a lot of telling us how he feels rather than showing it.

Comments

I can imagine a world in which voters play a Six-Degrees game to determine who a trustworthy leader. What other choice does a voter who is not themselves a policy wonkery specialist have? I guess that's why politicians travel around the country to meet all of the local political chieftains.

What's odd here is that because Quinn doesn't know anyone who knows Obama, that's somehow the fault of Obama. I mean, I don't know anyone who knows Sally Quinn.

Posted by Consumatopia | May 6, 2007 4:13 PM

I, too, was a bit taken aback by Kevin Drumm's take on the thing. Sally Quinn, I don't know. She must not travel with the right people (or apparently know how to use Mr. Google).

Posted by Gwen | May 6, 2007 4:19 PM

I say that our next job after electing a Democrat president, is to have all the gang of 500 permanently retired. Starting with Tweety and the Big Pumpkin.

Posted by Joe Klein's conscience | May 6, 2007 4:20 PM

Anyone in the media who doesn't know how to use Google these days deserves to be fired, no matter who you are.

Posted by Reality Man | May 6, 2007 4:32 PM

Funny ... the kewl kidz saying this about Obama didn't say this about G.W. Bush. I guess G.W. Bush had the right connections, the right family and the right skin color. It sometimes seems that the chattering classes think we are a feudal society.

Indeed, (and it used to be that conservatives were the first to point this out, at least whilst bashing the Kennedy family ... which goes to show the neo-manoralists who've dominated the GOP since Reagan's ascendancy are hardly real conservatives) the President is not supposed to be some everyday Joe (with whom we can imagine drinking beers) plucked to be a figure-head of our country, nor is the President supposed to be our Dear Leader who is to be adulated and followed, but rather the President is someone we, the people, have hired to run our country (which is why everything that Bush says about Congress playing politics is so wrong -- our representatives in Congress don't owe any fielty to him -- he ain't a king -- we've hired him to do a job and our representatives have every right to stop giving him money to do part of that job if he shows no signs of being able to do the job correctly ... alas, too few people understand this, and our media, because they are neo-manoralists or something -- they aren't even neo-feudalists 'cause they don't accept the reciprocal obligations entailed by feudalism -- is doing everything it can to make people ignorant and repeat the GOP spin on this issue).

The question though is "how do we the people go about picking a person who can actually do the job well (as well as someone who reflects our ideology about what jobs government needs to do)?" How do we make sure we get a competent President?

Letters of reference? From whom? Whom do we trust for that anyway?

I personally don't know ... but having the kewl kidz decide who's the bestest certainly ain't the ticket ... then we'd have President St. John McCain ... gevalt!

Posted by DAS | May 6, 2007 4:50 PM

It's about as elitist as it gets.

Note the royal "we" in "WE don't know who he is. Who are HIS people?"

He's not one of the Broder-approved Washington party-circuit insiders, so WE disapprove.

But isn't there also an undertone of racism in there, just to leaven the classicism a bit?

I mean, "his PEOPLE", for god sake?

Eh, maybe not. After all, it's the same thing that Quinn, Broder, and the WashPo queen-bees did to Bill Clinton, and it's not like he was black or anything....

Posted by chris | May 6, 2007 4:55 PM

typo in your final paragraph?

you write "...Obama has said enough about actual policy issues..."

did you mean to write "...Obama has NOT said enough about actual policy issues..."?

Posted by blue | May 6, 2007 5:29 PM

Bill Clinton, and it's not like he was black or anything.... - chris

But Bill Clinton was definitely a scalawag, and, among other things, the elite press corps[e] does seem to have the mindset of those opposing reconstruction 'cause they preferred the old, quasi-manoral order of the South (c.f. Morrison's comments on Clinton).

Posted by DAS | May 6, 2007 5:29 PM

And then there's Obama's spiritual adviser for the last two decades, the Afrocentrist black liberation theologist Jeremiah T. Wright.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/30/us/politics/30obama.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 6, 2007 5:56 PM

Also, Drum, unlike Yglesias, has now read Obama's Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance and has some interesting things to say about the Presidential candidate's autobiography:

"I've read Dreams From My Father, Obama's autobiographical "story of race and inheritance."

"... You'd think that after reading an autobiography you'd get a better sense of the author. But I didn't. In fact, there's a very oddly detached quality to the book, almost as if he's describing somebody else. This is clearest in the disconnect between emotions and events: Obama routinely describes himself feeling the deepest, most painful emotions imaginable (one event is like a "fist in my stomach," for example, and he "still burned with the memory" a full year after a minor incident in college), but these feelings seem to be all out of proportion to the actual events of his life, which are generally pretty pedestrian. Is he describing his real feelings? Is he simply making the beginning writer's mistake of thinking that the way to convey emotion is to use lots of adjectives? Or is something else going on?

"Another oddity is that we get very little sense of what motivates him. In 1983, for example, he decided to become a community organizer, but says in the book only that he was "operating mainly on impulse." Even with the benefit of a decade of hindsight, the only explanation he can offer is that it was "part of that larger narrative, starting with my father and his father before him, my mother and her parents, my memories of Indonesia with its beggars and farmers and the loss of Lolo to power, on through Ray and Frank, Marcus and Regina; my move to New York; my father's death." That's not very helpful.

"There's just something very peculiar about the book. I can't put my finger entirely on what it is, but for all the overwrought language that Obama employs on page after page, there's very little insight into what he believes and what really makes him tick. It was almost as if Obama was admitting to his moodiness and angst less as a way of letting us know who he is than as a way of guarding against having to really tell us. By the time I was done, I felt like I knew less about him than before."

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 6, 2007 5:59 PM

And yet, Sailer, at the thread over at Drum's place you got crushed like the sorry bug you are. Shouldn't you be off fucking your sister to keep the race pure?

Posted by Reality Man | May 6, 2007 6:06 PM

And then there's Obama's moneybags, Tony Rezko:

http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/353829,CST-NWS-rez23.article

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 6, 2007 6:07 PM

man, chris, you were worried about an undertone of racism in Quinn's piece.

It was awfully nice of Sailer to drop by, just to make it an official overtone.

Posted by yeesh | May 6, 2007 6:33 PM

It seems that Sailer's brain can't compute the fact that a black man is so much more intelligent and talented than he is.

Posted by JP | May 6, 2007 6:46 PM

That I don't recognize the names of any of Obama's people=Advantage Obama.

Why? Face it. In the world of Democratic campaign types, if I recognize your name, you're likely someone who loses elections.

That anyone gets excited about finding out who Obama's people are is pretty sad.

Posted by DCeiver | May 6, 2007 7:53 PM

Not to go too highbrow here, but there's a scene in Pride & Prejudice where the snooty (flash to Ferris Bueller's Day Off and the snooty/snotty distinction) old woman asks Elizabeth Bennet, in an imperious tone of voice, "Who *are* your people?" (or words to that effect) to remind her, "None of your connections are people I know or care about, so they are inconsequential to me and mine. Hah!"

Posted by Chris | May 7, 2007 12:43 AM

dciever is exactly right. if i see shrum as an advisor i immediately think "Loser" because that's what shrum is good at. Losing.

Posted by merlallen | May 7, 2007 3:16 AM

Quinn, of course, is a high priestess of the Washington establishment, one of those who thought Bill Clinton was just too lower class to be pressident:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/stories/quinn110298.htm

So, when she says about Obama:

We don't know who he is. Who are his people? Whom does he surround himself with? Whom does he listen to? Who gives him advice?

. . . what she really means is, He isn't one of us!

Posted by rea | May 7, 2007 6:51 AM

A couple of points;
(1) While Obama's first book doesn't give one an idea of how Obama thinks, The Audacity of Hope does-- and the whole "yes, but..." version of liberalism/progressivism that seems to be what he is about is validated by the latest piece in The New Yorker.
(2) I do think, however, that Quinn's points (her reluctance and reasons) is true not just about her, but about a lot of voters who might be inclined support Obama, but are slow to pull the trigger (including myself)--that we won't feel comfortable until there are more public endorsements, etc. (a little different from what Quinn refers to) from people who we know more about and trust. The Hundt citations may be relevant to the inside the beltway people, but are largely irrelevant outside.

Posted by PaulD | May 7, 2007 10:43 AM

Maybe it's because I'm the sort of person who really tries not to see certain forms of condescension, but although there were a lot of things one COULD be upset with in the original Quinn story, my first thought was "at least the woman is trying". And if someone is trying, even if they aren't a pitch perfect, and even if they will never be a progressive dream or even dreamlet, I don't see any point in biting them on the hand for it. Killing with kindness can work wonders, and also seems to fit Obama's style a lot better than something more strident.

So what else is going on? Well, it's good for Obama that people are *trying* to figure him out still. That means he's still interesting. People are not trying to figure out Mitt Romney--or Joe Biden for that matter. On the other hand, this "figuring out" of Obama seems to be interminable--sort of like the war in Iraq. One longs for Tom Friedman to say "I've stopped giving the war a chance" or to hear "OK, now we've figured out Obama". It's in Obama's interest to keep this kind of anticipatory rhetoric going, but really, one hopes he doesn't remain a blank slate forever.

Yes, it's quite disingenuous to say we don't know who Obama's "people" are, when it's hardly a secret. Any profile will mention at least a few of them, depending on the emphasis of the article. And I think it's also disingenuous for people to say (as I sometimes see from the Obama skeptics) that they still have no idea who Obama is or what he would do when president. Nobody knows *exactly* what they will do as president until they become president. But knowing roughly what Obama would do (and in some cases what he would not do) is not all that difficult to suss out. The agenda of any "electable" Democratic candidate is constrained, both by the structure of government, and by party expectations, and I would guess that at least 60% of what such a person would do would be quite similar to what any of the other Democratic candidates would do. That's actually a good thing--and why any Democratic candidate would be better than any Republican. But as for the rest--the part where someone can leave a "personal stamp"--well, even there, I see no signs that Obama would be dangerous or wrong--subject to newbie mistakes--quite possibly, but again, *anyone* aspiring to the white house next year will be in the same position.

Posted by JMS | May 7, 2007 2:17 PM

Matt, the update seems to imply that you've read the book and agree with Drum's criticism. I'd be surprised if that's true.

Drum's right that an intelligent reader understands that there is a part of Obama that he has chosen not to reveal. It is a complex rhetorical production, and it is abundantly clear that the writer is a complex guy.

I'd dispute that he's a bad writer, or does more telling thanb showing. It's just that he's used the memoir format to talk about things other than himself: family and ethnicity mostly.

Sailer's right that Obama rejects the saccharine "can we all get along" liberalism his candidacy is associated with. But then he rejects simple-minded nationalism too.

Posted by Pithlord | May 7, 2007 2:51 PM