Why We Watch Obama

“If I am the face of American foreign policy and American power...”
                                                                        —Barack Obama, beginning to wax profound

So began a recent, characteristically thoughtful and uncharacteristically game changing NYT magazine piece by James Traub. It's about Obama's unique take on the future of American foreign policy. But what strikes me for this blog is the piece—after so many months of the usual B.S. horse race coverage— finally fingers what makes Obama so compelling for so many more folks than those who are dying to see the first black president.

The headline, and this "so what" paragraph from near the top of the piece says it all:

Is (His) Biography (Our) Destiny?

He presents himself in all his cultural hybridity — African and American and Asian, black and white, infused with all-American hopefulness and with the reserve that comes of living on the receiving end of power.

The piece then goes on with reporting the (mostly admiring) observations of foreign policy experts on what Obama's foreign policy mind brings to the table. But the subtext, what Obama's being, maybe his soul, brings to the table—symbolized in his skin—is never buried.

Obama tells Traub that when:

“...you can tell people, ‘We have a president in the White House who still has a grandmother living in a hut on the shores of Lake Victoria and has a sister who’s half-Indonesian, married to a Chinese-Canadian,’ then they’re going to think that he may have a better sense of what’s going on in our lives and in our country. And they’d be right.”

Skillfully, Traub lets the Times reader (read educated, liberal but still not fully in-touch with their feelings of attraction) take a long, almost loving gaze on Obama as he relaxes in a comfortable chair on his jet and tries to catch a nap. What keeps him from dropping off is the nub of the story: it's one thing to stand for reforming our relationship to with a world that is not on average as white and/or Christian as we are. It's quite another thing to actually be not as white or as Christian or as Western as the American average.

Thus Hilary Clinton still has an almost commanding lead over Obama on the foreign policy/national security issues.Neither Hilary nor John Edwards, while pressing essentially the same critique of the war in Iraq and the need use more respect and humility and less military preemption in our foreign policy, is confronted by the "experience" question that still dog's Obama. All have no more foreign policy experience than you get being a Senator. None have ever been president, though Hilary (presumably) slept with one in the White House for eight years. Obama doesn't come close to calling it the liberal racism that it is.

But read, please, between these lines:

“Hillary gets a unique pass on this issue,” he went on, “not by virtue of her service in the Senate but by virtue of the idea that through osmosis she gets it from Bill. And they’ve been actively pushing that story.”

Obama finally leaned back to nap, and I went across the aisle. I was telling (Obama communications director Robert) Gibbs my theory that Americans might be looking for a president whose protection they can huddle under when Obama opened an eye. And as he resumed the conversation, the frustration of months of pedaling hard and getting nowhere began to show. He wanted to know what kind of experience Clinton supposedly had that he didn’t, and what kind of crisis she was supposedly better suited to than he, and why “toughness” had become a stand-in for experience, and how Clinton could get credit for it when she failed to stand up to Bush on the Iraq vote. We batted all this around. Finally he said, “Ask Nye why Hillary’s paint-by-the-numbers foreign policy makes her more qualified to handle a crisis when for most of our history our crises have come from using force when we shouldn’t, not by failing to use force.” I promised that I would.

And how did Harvard professor Joseph Nye, whose book about the Bush folks critical failure to use "soft power" should make him an Obama supporter (but he's not) answer?

“By osmosis of going through this,” Nye said, though he conceded that he wasn’t sure tacit knowledge could in fact be acquired osmotically. And he added that he had great respect for Obama. “It is,” he said, “a 51-49 type of distinction.”

"Great respect." I don't think Nye meant it this way, but I can't help hearing echoes of Sen. Joe Biden's gaffe about how Obama was "so articulate" in that remark.

It remains to be seen whether Obama will be able to focus America's still vague yearning to embrace the greater truth engraved in Obama's American Skin.  I've been humbled, to say the least, by how many of my pronouncements about the meaning of the browning of American popular culture over the last 20 years have turned out wrong. It's a subject I'll be taking up in posts to come.

But, humbly, I still think I was right about one thing: A sizable part of this country is trying to find a way to believe that Barack Obama's story is their own. So far, though, the fear factor is up, even if it's only 51 to 49.