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  On the Campaign Trail: Obama Unplugged

On the Campaign Trail Obama Unplugged

By Gabor Steingart in Washington, D.C.

Part 2: Finding the Comfort Zone in Every Audience

The candidate proceeds on the basis that no one in the audience is capable of mental arithmetic. After all, if his speech became government policy tomorrow, then the new president would have to head straight to the International Monetary Fund the next day to ask for a loan.

Obama is demanding what the Republicans call "big government," a free-spending state. He promises to bring in socialized medicine without mentioning how he will finance it. He wants to found an American bank for the poor based on the concept of the World Bank, he wants to give money to after-school centers and transform the minimum wage into a real living wage, which would automatically increase with any rise in inflation.

Italy had this "mobile scale" for decades. It proved to be a unique program for devaluing the currency, which is why the Italian politicians were so unsentimental in ditching the lira for the euro.

Barack Obama is a candidate who knows and addresses the comfort zones of any audience. He talks of leadership but it reeks of following. He wants to be modern but a lot of what he says sounds highly antiquated. His selling points in Washington's southeast stem exclusively from the sunken treasure of old school liberals.

His thoughts on the welfare state go back to Martin Luther King Jr., as he freely admits. "If we can find the money to put a man on the moon, then we can find the money to put a man on his own two feet," he says, citing the civil rights leader. That may sound good, but more than anything it sounds naïve.

Expensive and Foolish

Anyone with any sense already knows who will end up paying for these choices -- the middle class. That's why Obama's program is not just expensive but also foolish. The underclass in America is massive -- 40 million people live below the poverty line. But it is not big enough to provide the base for an election victory. And people in Harlem, Brooklyn and even in a New Orleans devastated by Hurricane Katrina are not in a revolutionary mood. The poor are less likely than average to vote, and it cannot automatically be assumed that the poor will vote for the left. Indeed, many live on the left but vote for the right.

It was for this reason that Bill Clinton when he was campaigning was so clever in appealing to the "forgotten middle classes." And the German version, namely Gerhard Schröder's campaign appeal to the "new middle" in 1998 was also a big success. Barack Obama, however, is fishing in a much smaller pond.

But should campaign speeches be taken so seriously? Probably not, say those involved. Former US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a great war president and a passionate campaigner, felt it unreasonable to keep him to his loud-mouthed campaign promises: He told critics that campaign speeches were merely placards, not engravings.

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