Sunday, March 23, 2008
Opinion

Obama’s Achilles’ heel

Obama is often very positively compared to President John F. Kennedy...

CREDIT: EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP/Getty Images
Barack Obama receives the support of Caroline Kennedy, daughter of JFK, during a rally on Feb. 4.
By Stephanie Ramage

A friend of mine in New England called last week after Sen. Barack Obama’s speech in Philadelphia addressing the Rev. Jeremiah Wright debacle.

I heard “Obama is a genius!” before he’d even identified himself.

I can understand his reaction. For people who love the English language as much as I do, Obama’s speeches are like an all-you-can-eat buffet at the best restaurant in the world. And coming at the end of the Bush presidency, Obama’s speeches are like an all-you-can-eat buffet at the best restaurant in the world after living off grubs in the forest for eight years. (I have not demonized Bush and I’m not going to start now, but it’s no secret that he could stand to work on his communication skills.)

My friend, who is a devout Catholic and a staunch Republican, works in what I affectionately refer to as the cerebral knitting department of a university. He writes about ontology and phenomenology a lot. “His speech was historically sound and it was so well written, I’d love to study it,” he gushed, lauding Obama’s ability to unite America and his refusal to talk like a “victicrat.”

“I think he’d probably do a good job,” he said, although he isn’t sure, he added coyly, who he’s going to vote for next November.

I agreed with him. I had been saying similar stuff about Obama before the Wright episode. I have no doubt that Obama won over many more supporters through that wonderful speech on March 18 than he lost through the whole sorry Wright drama.
But the Wright chapter has fixed a glaring spotlight on Obama’s lack of experience.

If Obama becomes our president, it will be his job to appoint cabinet members: secretaries of defense, state, education, agriculture, commerce and other departments. He will have to appoint an attorney general and a surgeon general. He will appoint judges, too. And all of these will have a tremendous bearing on the direction of this country. One of the chief and most valid complaints against the Bush administration has been Bush’s cronyism, his prioritizing of loyalty over skill in filling cabinet positions. Consider the impact of Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, to name a few.

Obama appointed Wright to his African American Religious Leadership Committee because Wright was his own minister, much as Bush nominated Harriet Miers to replace Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court because she had been his attorney back in Texas and subsequently became presidential counsel. (Fortunately, Miers herself asked to be withdrawn from consideration for the post.)

The fact that Wright espouses crazy conspiracy theories and has a warped view of whites didn’t dawn on Obama in the 20 years that he attended Wright’s church. 

“Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect,” Obama said in Philadelphia. “He contains within him the contradictions—the good and the bad—of  the community that he has served diligently for so many years. I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.”

I admire Obama’s personal loyalty. In a country where friends and even family are too often jettisoned in the name of ambition or greed, such allegiance is rare. But he gave Wright—a man who preached from the pulpit the bizarre conspiracy theory that the American government flooded the black community with drugs and manufactured HIV as a weapon of genocide against people of color—a campaign position because of that personal loyalty. People come up with diplomatic excuses not to give people jobs or name them to boards all the time. Couldn’t Obama have come up with some excuse not to put Wright on his council?

Obama is often very positively compared to President John F. Kennedy, but Obama’s appointing of Wright to his campaign’s religious advisory committee in the first place reminds me of the great and terrible weakness of the Kennedy administration—JFK’s inability to judge the suitability of the men around him for positions in his government.

I am no fan of the late David Halberstam (as I detailed in this space last April), but this possible Achilles’ heel of Obama’s keeps reminding me of one particular passage in the new introduction of the 20th anniversary edition of “The Best and the Brightest,” Halberstam’s book about the Kennedy administration:

“Among those dazzled by the Administration team was Vice President Lyndon Johnson. After attending his first cabinet meeting, he went back to his mentor Sam Rayburn and told him with great enthusiasm how extraordinary they were, each brighter than the next. ... ‘Well, Lyndon,’ Mr. Sam answered, ‘you may be right and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say, but I’d feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once.’”

Halberstam went on to explain that it was his favorite story in the book because “it underlines the weakness of the Kennedy team, the difference between intelligence and wisdom, between the abstract quickness and verbal facility which the team exuded, and true wisdom, which is the product of hard-won, often bitter experience.”

I don’t know how it is possible to judge Obama’s wisdom other than by his actions, and it was not wise to appoint Wright to a position within his campaign. What does this bode for President Barack Obama’s cabinet appointments? SP

Stephanie Ramage is news editor of The Sunday Paper.