I spent Sunday with Hillary (and Bill) Clinton and Monday with Barack Obama in New Hampshire, and there were some flagrant compare and contrast moments…and some striking similarities:
Biggest Striking Similarity: Both candidates are emphasizing the exact same issues and they are saying almost the exact same things about those issues. The consultants and their focus groups have never seemed more powerful. Health care for every single American (except that neither has produced a plan to do that–Obama’s lacks a mandate and we’ll see about Hillary’s, when she launches in a couple of weeks). Energy independence. End the war. Restore America’s place in the world. Raise up the middle class. End cronyism. Both candidates have populist flickers, and name the Insurance companies, Big Oil, Big Pharma as corporate evildoers.
Biggest Difference She seems confident and he seems defensive. Her crowds were bigger than his. Obama’s big set-piece Labor Day rally in Manchester was about 1/4 as big as Clinton’s the day before. Her message is confident, but sterile in the extreme–she has the experience to bring change. Experience and change are focus groups words. Obama’s message could be written by Amy Winehouse:
the pundits say I’m inexperienced
but I say no, no, no
Maureen Dowd, lurking behind the Times firewall, demolished Obama’s “I’m an Outsider” trope today.
A Smaller Difference Defensive or not, Obama remains a much more compelling speaker–and speech-writer–than Clinton. She went on like…forever…in her two New Hampshire speeches, much of it standard boilerplate and mattress ticking–and coy positioning. “You need to know when to stand your ground, and when to find common ground.” Translation: Edwards never wants to compromise. Obama only wants to compromise. I can do whichever, depending on the circumstances. To which one can only say: Uhhh, okay.
Obama’s response to this–“It’s not who can play the game better, it’s who can put an end to game-playing”–is something of a game as well. But the language and passion of the next section of his speech transcended gamesmanship:
I have never seen politics as a game. From the day I decided to become a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago over two decades ago, I have always seen politics as a mission – as the way we hold this country up to our highest ideals. And when we’ve fallen short of those ideals, it’s this sense of mission that has compelled Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs to put aside their differences and push their shoulder against the wheel of history in search of a better day.
It’s this sense of mission that led my grandfather to enlist after Pearl Harbor and sent my grandmother to a bomber assembly line. It’s what led thousands of young people I’ll never know to sit at lunch counters and brave fire hoses so that we all might be free. It’s what led my father to keep writing letters until someone answered his prayer and gave him his ticket to America. And it’s what led me to those poor neighborhoods in Chicago, so that I could do my part to help folks who had lost jobs and lost hope when the local steel plant closed.
It’s politics as a mission. And if you don’t spend your whole life in Washington, it becomes easier to remember what this means. The other day I got head to out to California because the Service Employees’ Union had organized an event where I would walk in the shoes of one of their members for a day. And so I woke up at five a.m. and met up with this sixty-one-year-old woman named Pauline Beck who was a home care worker. Every day of her life she wakes up and she takes care of two foster children who do not have a family of their own. Then she goes to work and she takes care of an eighty-seven-year-old amputee. And so I went with her to work, and we scrubbed the floors and we did the laundry and cleaned the rooms.
It was one of the best days I’ve had on the campaign so far. Because it reminded me of what we’re doing here. Listening to this humble woman talk about the hardships of her life without a trace of self-pity, glad she could be of some service to somebody, just wanting a little bit more pay to take care of those kids, a little more security for her retirement, maybe a day off once in awhile to rest her tired back, I was reminded that for all the noise and the pettiness coming out of Washington, what holds this country together is this fundamental belief that we all have a stake in each other – that I am my brother’s keeper; that I am my sister’s keeper. And that must express itself not only in our churches and synagogues or in our personal lives, but in our government too.
The simple humanity of Pauline Beck, as recounted by Barack Obama, was far more powerful and memorable than anything I’ve ever heard Hillary Clinton say. It reminded me that both these candidates have considerable strengths, but are still incomplete–and so is this race. Clinton’s practicality seems more plausible now, but the moment may come when Obama’s youth and passion seems precisely what is needed to confront the tired old Republicans. Clinton has had a better summer than Obama, but there’s a long autumn to come…and, after that, an endless last two weeks of the campaign, when Iowans and New Hampshirites will change their minds, and change them again, and then make their choices.