A Heads-Up For Barack Obama

Can we really know a political candidate? The answer is: "Not easily." Each of them has a private and public life. And contrary to common wisdom neither is necessarily a true indicator of how they think, let alone what they'll do, when president. It's possible to have a private self with one set of beliefs and a public one guided more by what is best for the country.

In George W. Bush we've gotten used to self-interest so intense that it permeates public life requiring, we learned too late, only the intense loyalty of a set of self-interested, spineless followers to maintain office.

If we're to avoid the same fate for four or eight more years, it's important to ask whether presidential candidates are capable of relying on their private beliefs for strength, some degree of guidance and moral conviction as Madeline Albright proposes, but also whether they have a public dimension of self driven by a keen sense of duty to their country and its citizens.

Where do we turn for such information? Not to the most obvious or common places. Religious affiliation, for example, is rarely a window into the mind or the soul. Religions are not private. They operate in the public sphere organizing and guiding people of similar views regarding the existence and nature of God. By contrast, faith functions in the private sphere, requiring no demonstration for its existence. Being religious, honestly so, anyway, is to express private faith in a public way. It tells us relatively little about how a candidate for president prioritizes.

Can we know candidates then by what they say? In this day of "handlers" that route too is strewn with traps.

When I hear people of a certain age lament the nonexistence of statesmen, they are really saying we lack people who were raised and encouraged to consider the best interests of those around them, whose private lives inform their public ones in ways beneficial to people much different from themselves. They have learned to articulate concern for those people in a credible, persuasive manner derived from honesty and driven by a desire to make things better not for themselves alone but for society. Such people do not detest power but use it for making and keeping socially constructive promises rather than feathering the nests of the unconditionally loyal. These are people whose public selves are not separate from the private but are nonetheless well developed beyond it. The views they espouse at home are at times not the ones they feel compelled to adopt for the good of fellow citizens and human beings. Their struggle between the two is occasionally obvious and because of this we trust them more. We know from our own lives that difficult problems are rarely solved by easy answers.

In Barack Obama's August 1 speech there are indications of a man struggling to compose a candidate who could lead America out of the tent of dishonesty where all disagreement must generate with-or-against-us hatreds to the openness of discussion and debate. His is not the rhetoric of selfishness or hoarding power. Instead he advocates working with allies to formulate a concerted front against terrorism and communicating with the American people to generate better solutions.

Yet slips and misjudgments occur for all presidential candidates. And Barack Obama is no exception. His repeated use of "take them out" when referring to terrorists is not the phraseology of a world leader, no matter how hateful the enemy. It's tough but vacuous and we've had enough of that. It conjures up images of a military-flight-jacket-wearing president walking with his arms out from his sides making himself appear bigger, ready to take on all who oppose him, while at the same time looking ludicrous.

Certainly this isn't going to be Barack Obama's undoing. But it seemed a contradiction to the person he was telling us he is in much of the rest of his speech. It's fine to have help crafting a speech but it's the speaker who ultimately must determine if what he says reflects who he is. If Obama resorts to repeating cheap phrases like George Bush does to garner a certain effect, then in that regard he'll be the "Bush-Cheney lite" he attributes to Hillary Clinton.

We deserve far better. And if I'm reading him right, upon reflection he may even agree. If not, then he may not be who I thought he was.

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