Sullivan is frustrated that more people don’t acknowledge Obama’s copious outpourings of wonkery.  There are two separate problems here.  There are apparently people who believe that Obama has no specific policy proposals, which is a ridiculous thing to believe and does reflect their inattention to Obama’s campaign.  Then there are people who believe that he does not use these policy proposals in many of his major speeches or on the stump, and that he and his admirers very consciously cultivate an image of the visionary.  That seems to be not only a defensible view, but a legitimate criticism of the style of the campaign.  I notice that some progressives remain underwhelmed by Obama for the same reason: rhetoric and persuasion are all very well, but they want it to be persuasion in the service of their politics, and they simply don’t see Obama doing that nearly enough to their satisfaction.    

Here is the full and correct quote from his DNC speech last year that I rephrased in another post: “We’ve had a lot of plans, Democrats. What we’ve had is a shortage of hope.”  The implication of that line is that plans are secondary or almost irrelevant, but, in fact, plans (and preferably good plans) are what distinguish the successful executive from the wistful hopemonger.  The point of this line of criticism is not that Obama has no ideas, but that his supporters do not embrace him because of his ideas, he doesn’t use his policy ideas to attract support and he doesn’t employ his considerable rhetorical skills to advance an agenda.  This is true to some extent of all successful candidates.  Part of this can be attributed to the sheer closeness of the Democratic candidates on policy questions, which makes differences in style and rhetoric seem more significant, but not most of it.  As I am reminded time and again, substantive policy campaigns fail, because most voters are not voting on policy, but are voting on sentiment, identity and almost anything else except policy.  But even by the standards of normal election year gasbaggery Obama stands out as exceptional in his preference for high-minded “uplift” over specifics.  Yes, he gives policy speeches, as he has done on a number of topics, and some of us have read or heard them and then made critical remarks about those speeches, but on the whole that is not what Obama does.       

Those who have been following his campaign since last year know that he does have some specific proposals and has made them public long ago.  I tend to focus on candidates’ foreign policy positions, so I am best-versed in his proposals in this area.  In his address here in Chicago last year, his Foreign Affairs essay, in the debates and in his much-discussed remarks on Pakistan, he has been quite specific and generally quite horrifying.  No non-interventionist or realist voter could look at his foreign policy and rationally conclude that he is their candidate, but somehow he has become a tribune of many antiwar and realist voters.  What I find frustrating about Obama supporters is their desire to stress the international potential of Obama’s symbolism and rhetoric as part of the primary appeal of Obama, while casually ignoring or downplaying all those policy views on foreign policy that Obama has held that all but guarantee that an Obama administration would be virtually as unpopular abroad as the current one.  There simply is not all that much engagement with Obama’s views in this area of policy in particular.  One of the reasons for this may be that once his supporters looked closely at what he was proposing in foreign policy they would not be feeling nearly so inspired.  This is one part of the problem I have with Obama and Obamamania: the enthusiasm for the candidate is almost entirely detached from what the candidate proposes to do, and the assessments of his symbolic potential, whether domestically or internationally, essentially have to ignore Obama’s leftist politics and interventionist foreign policy (i.e., the substance of his views and record) to craft this notion of Obama as a unifying or conciliatory figure.