Last spring, a story about presidential contender Barack Obama appeared below this headline in The Washington Post: "Is Obama All Style and Little Substance?" The candidate, a Harvard Law School graduate and former professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago, is clearly highly intelligent. On the stump he is articulate and, when at the top of his game, capable of inspiring crowds and filling them with hope. But is there, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, any "there" there?
Obama met for nearly two hours Tuesday with the Monitor's editorial board. That meeting cleared up any question of whether the 46-year-old senator was a man of substance. He is.
Rather than answer queries with slices from stump speeches, Obama paused to weigh the heft of each, then answered thoughtfully and in full. He conveyed his knowledge of issues clearly with no need to cite studies or recite statistics. He wanted, he said, not to make a speech but have a conversation.
Obama is the son of a white mother from a small Kansas town and a black father from Kenya who grew up in the village where Obama's grandmother still lives. He lived with his mother and attended school in Indonesia in his early youth, grew up in Hawaii and came East to attend Columbia University. Those experiences and his mixed race shaped him and made him a man who knows who he is and what he wants.
If elected, Obama's first goal would be to re-deploy all the U.S. troops in Iraq who are not needed to protect America's embassy and to pursue terrorists. No pullout can be done safely in six months, he said, and anyone who says it can, "isn't telling the truth."
His second goal: reforming America's disintegrating health care system. That, he said, must be done in the honeymoon period, the first half of his first term.
Third is a new energy policy but, because Washington can only address one big problem at a time, he says, that can't be done until solutions are found to Iraq and health care. His approach is pragmatic.
Obama's ideas are not new or radical. In fact, in most areas, they differ little from those of his chief Democratic rivals. But unlike the other candidates, Obama claims, he can inspire the public and build the political support and bipartisan coalitions it will take to bring about universal health insurance and an environmentally responsible energy policy.
Obama's calm demeanor leaves one wondering whether, in the parlance of basketball, a game he still plays, he has elbows sharp enough to mix it up with the bad boys, and girls, bent on preventing him from scoring. That remains to be seen. The next presidential campaign, especially if Democrats nominate Obama or Sen. Hillary Clinton, promises to descend to new and scurrilous lows.
Asked what he says to those who wish he would gain more experience before running for president, Obama says voters should consider three more important things: whether he has the vision, the skill and the judgment to lead the nation.
Obama clearly has the first quality. Voters in New Hampshire's Democratic Party still have a few more months to decide if he has the other two as well.
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