Rhetoric v. Reality - a false choice

Unhappy with her current second place standing in the Democratic Primaries, Senator Hillary Clinton is again engaging in some poorly considered attacks on Senator Obama. “There's a big difference between us - speeches versus solutions,” Clinton stated last week, “Talk versus action. You know, some people may think words are change. But you and I know better. Words are cheap.” Cheap words indeed.

Never the first to come up with any idea in his entire career, John McCain attempted to hop on the Hillary train: “To encourage a country with only rhetoric rather than sound and proven ideas . . . is not a promise of hope,” McCain said last week, “It’s a platitude.”

Trouble with both of these statements – as applied to Obama, they are not true. Anyone that cares to know whether Obama has any specifics to offer need only pick up his book or check out his web site. Obama gives reams of specifics. And some of them are pretty good specifics. While I have preferred some of Clinton’s policy proposals to Obama’s (particularly regarding health care), and have noted that Paul Krugman has taken issue with some of the specifics of those proposals, let’s face it, Krugman can only take issue with Obama’s specifics because they exist! If memory serves, it was Hillary Clinton, not Barack Obama, that was late to the specifics game, choosing instead to triangulate and equivocate through much of the 2007 primary race.

But is in overarching governing strategy, rather than the specifics, where Obama differentiates himself. And I think it’s the real reason he won me over.

Clinton talks only specifics (she now calls them solutions – a better word, but not a change of tactic). Like Bill Clinton, the Great Pragmatist, Senator Clinton has a number of specific solutions to specific problems, but gives you no idea how she got to those solutions, or how she might tackle new problems. To me, way too much focus on individual issues without painting an overall governing strategy. Her “solutions” are to particularized problems, with no vision at all (or at least none articulated) for where she wants to take the country.

McCain wouldn’t know a solution if it bit him in the ass. His whole platform is “four more years … of whatever that other guy has been doing, even though I don’t have a clue what it is.” That is McCain, in a nutshell. He can’t give you an idea of his problem-solving strategy because he doesn’t have any. He tilts at windmills: that’s his thing. That’s his only thing. Not a clue about the vast, non-windmill landscape.

Obama gives us more than either Clinton or McCain: he actually explains how he approaches a problem. In his book -- and less completely in his speeches -- he explains his goals, his method of analysis, the balancing of interests he believes are important, and the overall end result he seeks to achieve (e.g. increased opportunity and better-shared prosperity). Obama is a deep thinker; has given serious study to political history, constitutional law, and political economic theory (i.e. how government interacts with the economy). It’s all right there in his book, if anyone cares to check.

Obama starts his problem-solving analysis by trying to understand various points of view, where people are coming from, what are their motivations and concerns. There’s a word for that process, its called empathy. It is a powerful tool, and Obama isn’t at all afraid to use it.

And Obama is clear about his goals: he seeks to build a country that really is a land of opportunity: opportunity and all that it encompasses (national security, education, research, anti-poverty, better safety net, updated military, etc.) All good stuff.