Obama’s cut-and-paste job does respond to the complaint that he is without substance. But it’s hard to mix poetry and prose and come up with an appealing product. Particularly when, as columnist Robert Samuelson points out, there’s not much that’s interesting about the substance. ~Michael Barone

This balancing act of mixing the “uplift” with policy detail was always going to be difficult, as I suggested a while back, but it is made more so by the fact that the candidate of “change” cannot really be confused with the candidate of “new ideas.”  They may or may not be good ideas, but little of what he proposes is bold or original.  This is actually a rather unfair test, and it is mostly professional pundits and the chatterati who want a candidate to offer something “interesting,” but it is a legitimate criticism of Obama to the extent that he claims to represent something different from the “same old politics.”  Attacking the “same old politics” has a nice ring to it, but it helps if the candidate has practiced some demonstrably “new” politics and it is even more important if it is really the “same old politics” that voters find so tiresome.  As I keep insisting, Americans’ complaints against the political system today do not derive from frustration over a lack of bipartisanship and collaboration, but a frustration with the lack of representation they have in both parties on major policies where the political class is deeply at odds with the majority of the public. 

Obama at his most “post-partisan” suggests that he will combine members of both parties in the service of what Samuelson dubbed the “sanctification of the status quo.”  In other words, the themes of Obama’s campaign point towards reinforcing the establishment and all the worst instincts of the political class, and so deepening popular frustration.  Rather than sharper, clearer distinctions between parties and alternative policy agendas, Obama seems to promise that the differences will be muted even more.  This may be one more reason why the journalists and pundits who idolise “centrism” find Obama so intriguing, and why they continue not very subtly to cheer for him: he is diverting a flood of public discontent into easily managed channels of the status quo. 

Meanwhile, the progressive activist criticism of Obama that I have seen most often is that he isn’t the most progressive, or at least that he isn’t running as the most progressive candidate of the major Democratic candidates (and you heard this even more often when Edwards was still in the race), and even to the extent that they are willing to grant that most of his policies are just as progressive as Clinton’s they are offended by his style.  At the same time, he does, in fact, have a very progressive record, which ought to unnerve conservatives and at least some independents, but doesn’t seem to very much.  Obama is suffering from the reverse of the problem Huckabee has had.  Scorned by the party for being a liberal squish, Huckabee is feared by everyone outside “very conservative” voters as a would-be theocrat (and is supported by “very conservative” voters who may think that he is one), which is almost exactly the opposite of what should have happened.  For his part, Obama should have easily won over progressive activists without any effort, while encountering significant problems in appealing to independents and Republicans, yet something more like the opposite has occurred. 

This suggests that appearances and perceptions are vastly more significant than “substance,” and this is true even for the hardened activists who think that they are making intellectual judgements about the merits of the various candidates.  This still puts Obama in an odd bind: if he plays the hopemonger, pundits scoff at the message’s emptiness, and if he talks about unity, progressives grow wary of his lack of combativeness, but it isn’t clear what he could be doing differently that would not have brought him to the same fate as Edwards.  Obama and McCain to some degree find themselves in the same situation: having run relatively more towards the center than their opponents during the primaries, they must now satisfy activists who doubt their commitment, their willingness to “fight” for the cause.  The complaints about Obama on this score are more muted, because they are for the most part criticisms of his style (though his health care plan does generate some dissatisfaction on the left), but they are there. 

Coming back to an old topic, it is not now, and hasn’t been for months, a question of whether Obama has something substantive to say, but whether most of his supporters know anything about this and also whether what he has to say seems compelling to a large enough number of voters.  His “boilerplate liberalism,” as it has been called, may sell better this time than at any time in my life, but it makes the opposing boilerplate conservatism that McCain will rehash, however unpersuasively, much more competitive than it would otherwise be.  Bizarrely, given Obama’s stated concern not to re-fight old battles, this election promises to be yet another re-fighting of the same rather tired arguments.  The arguments are tired, because they have been rehearsed so many times, but they have been rehearsed so many times because they continue to mobilise voters and because they continue to represent some differences between the party’s constituencies.  

Obama does seem to be blessed by an opponent who has literally nothing new or interesting to say, but the entire conversation about Obama’s substance and a lack of “interesting” policy ideas has probably missed something crucial.  Pundits, journalists and bloggers, hyper-attentive and obsessed political junkies that we are, repeatedly mistake the appearance of vacuity for a political weakness, which is remarkable given the amount of time we all spend, myself included, discussing the “atmospherics” and symbolism of campaigning and the “horse race” rather than specific policy questions.  Within reason, the less defined a candidate is the better his chances of tapping into the public’s discontent, as they can see in him whatever they want to see.  However, the line between a popular empty vessel and a ridiculed empty suit is a thin one.       

As I must keep reminding myself, democratic elections do not actually turn on policy (except in a negative, reactive way of people rebelling against an incumbent who has presided over a period of economic or political failure), and the policy agenda effectively matters only to the extent that it persuades activists and journalists alike to approve of a candidate as suitably in alignment with the activists and suitably “serious” and not “too far” to one side of the spectrum or the other.  If most voters are non-ideological, and the more ideological constituencies of both parties are locked in to supporting their respective nominees as a matter of interest or party loyalty or both, what matters is not so much what positions on policy a candidate takes as it is the impression of competence and understanding that these positions convey.  The reason why the relatively more wonkish, detail-oriented candidates repeatedly come up short is that they confuse a display of competence and understanding with demonstrating intense expertise with the specifics of their policies, which matter primarily to interest groups, bloggers and box-checking ideological gnomes.  Romney could run rings around McCain and Huckabee with his expertise, but that didn’t matter.  The same has been true with Clinton in her struggle with Obama. 

All the things that horrify a republican about mass democracy–the identitarianism, the “gut-level connection,” the vacuous rhetoric and the cheap, manipulative symbolism–help to explain why we end up with the candidates we do, and they will explain why the aloof, relatively more expert candidate in the general election, Obama, will end up losing.