Charles Kaiser on Obama's risky move toward the center

"The mantra was, 'If the same people show up that always show up—we're gonna lose.' We needed to build a new coalition of voters."
—Hans Riemer, youth vote director, Obama campaign, quoted by Tim Dickinson in Rolling Stone

Who is Barack Obama?

Is he a transformative figure, a man who brought millions of young Americans into politics for the first time by embracing bold positions on the war in Iraq and the lawlessness of the Bush administration?

Or is he a slick Chicago politician, a man who reached out to passionate young voters when he needed them to triumph in the primaries—but is now quite willing to abandon them, to follow the most conventional road of all, the one that leads to the center of American politics?

As I have said from the beginning, it required a leap of faith to support a junior senator from Illinois with so little experience on the national stage of American politics. And for many months he did nothing to disappoint: insisting on American withdrawal from Iraq, promising to filibuster a terrible wiretapping bill that would inoculate the phone companies from liability for their law-breaking, and, most impressive, using the intemperate remarks of his former pastor to deliver the most sophisticated speech about race I have ever heard.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, he seemed to lurch toward the middle, praising a Supreme Court decision that struck down Washington, D.C.'s gun law, endorsing the death penalty for child rapists, questioning whether mental health concerns could justify a late-term abortion, abandoning public campaign financing, and endorsing faith-based initiatives. (On the other side of the ledger, he also supported the best Supreme Court decision of the summer—the one restoring the right to habeas corpus for the inmates on Guantanamo.)

None of those seeming shifts made me especially happy, but some of them were not actually new, either. He had already supported the death penalty for child rapists in the second volume of his autobiography, his endorsement of the right to bear arms has always been coupled with a commitment to sensible gun control laws, and his speech in favor of faith-based initiatives included a vital difference from the Bush administration. Under Obama's proposal, for the first time, any religious organization receiving federal money would be prohibited from discriminating in its employment practices on the basis of religion, or anything else.

This capacity to see issues from several perspectives is actually one of Obama's more attractive qualities, and probably the way in which his mind most resembles Jack Kennedy's.

In a superb literary review of Obama's two books in the New Republic, Columbia professor Andrew Delbanco does a splendid job of identifying the candidate's approach to the world. Over and over, Delbanco finds "the same internal counterpoise in the sentences: 'Most evangelicals are more tolerant than the media would have us believe, most secularists more spiritual' ... 'most rich people want the poor to succeed, and most of the poor are more self-critical and hold higher aspirations than the popular culture allows.' When he scans the human landscape, Obama tends to notice contradictory individuals more than coherent interest groups. His sentences are alive because they are in tension with themselves ... This is the writing of someone trying to map a route through a world where choices are less often between good and bad than between competing goods."

These are the very qualities that made Obama attractive to so many of us in the first place. And my feeling of identification with him is strengthened by his taste in music, which was the most interesting thing Jann Wenner elicited from him in his interview in the current Rolling Stone. The candidate has all of Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks on his iPod—and he especially likes "Maggie's Farm," because, "It speaks to me as I listen to some of the political rhetoric."

When Obama first became passionate about music, he fell in love with Stevie Wonder's five greatest albums: Music of My Mind, Talking Book, Fulfillingness' First Finale, Innervisions, and Songs in the Key of Life. Obama said, "Those are as brilliant a set of five albums as we've ever seen"—and that is exactly what they are.

Unfortunately, and as the baby boomers have proven so disastrously, having the right taste in music doesn't necessarily translate into the right core convictions. Which brings us to Obama's clearest and most distasteful flip-flop: his endorsement of the wiretapping bill now before the Senate.

During the primary season, Obama promised a filibuster to prevent the passage of this outrageous act. And an editorial in today's New York Times enumerates all of the important reasons that he should never have abandoned that position:

• "Congress has been far too compliant as President Bush undermined the Bill of Rights and the balance of powers. It now has a chance to undo some of that damage—if it has the courage and good sense to stand up to the White House and for the Constitution."

• The bill "would needlessly expand the government's ability to spy on Americans and ensure that the country never learns the full extent of President Bush's unlawful wiretapping."

• It "dangerously weakens the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA," which "requires the government to get a warrant to intercept communications between anyone in this country and anyone outside it—and show that it is investigating a foreign power, or the agent of a foreign power, that plans to harm America."

• "Lawmakers are already justifying their votes for making major changes to that proven regime by saying that the bill is a reasonable compromise that updates FISA technologically and will make it somewhat harder to spy on Americans abroad. But none of that mitigates the bill's much larger damage. It would make it much easier to spy on Americans at home, reduce the courts' powers and grant immunity to the companies that turned over Americans' private communications without a warrant."

• "The real reason this bill exists is because Mr. Bush decided after 9/11 that he was above the law."

That last reason is the heart of the matter. Millions of newly political young people rallied to Obama's banner in the spring because of a deep anger and disgust over the seven lawless years of the Bush administration, which brought endless war, unprecedented torture by the American government—and extensive and utterly illegal surveillance of the American people.

This simply is not an issue that Obama can reverse himself on without calling into question his most basic convictions.

It won't make me stop supporting him: I still agree with him on almost every important issue—and the alternative is simply the void. But the politics of this reversal bother me almost as much as the substance. Even though this week's polls are very encouraging, it remains a dauntingly difficult task to elect a black man as president of the United States. And as Obama's own youth director pointed out, "If the same people show up that always show up—we're gonna lose."

That is why new voters, especially voters under 30, are still Obama's most important constituency—and why it is genuinely reckless to risk losing their enthusiasm.

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