No question Obama is in. He leaves not a hint of a doubt in his virtual announcement. (See text and video here). My first impression is that he’s smart to do it this way rather than, as Ana and I had suggested, on Oprah or some other contrived venue. And it’s wise to make the formal announcement in Illinois. Obama may transcend a lot of the old political tropes, but he needs to be from somewhere. Since most Americans think of Hawaii as a vacation destination and not a place where real people actually live and grow up, Obama needs to root himself somewhere. Illinois it is.
We all knew Obama would run, if he ran, as an agent of change. What’s clear from today’s statement is that Obama will elevate change into a broad rationale for his candidacy:
But challenging as they are, it’s not the magnitude of our problems that concerns me the most. It’s the smallness of our politics. America’s faced big problems before. But today, our leaders in Washington seem incapable of working together in a practical, common sense way. Politics has become so bitter and partisan, so gummed up by money and influence, that we can’t tackle the big problems that demand solutions.
And that’s what we have to change first. (emphasis mine).
Since he’ll have trouble competing with his Democratic rivals when it comes to policy credentials, he’s making a virtue out of a potential liability here. If the issue that matters most isn’t Iraq or health care reform but fixing our broken politics, the guy with almost no experience in Washington makes sense. Obama, at least, seems more plausible.
Or so David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs (and Barack Obama) hope.