The conventional wisdom has started to congeal (that seems the best way to describe the process) that the election will primarily over whether the public will accept Obama, the relative unknown and newcomer to the scene, and this will end up turning, as it did in 1980, on whether the public becomes comfortable with someone whose ideas on a lot of things are purported to be (by his critics at least) far out of the mainstream.  The comparison to Reagan in ’80 and Reagan’s success in the debate with Carter should give the Obama campaign pause, since Obama has had some notoriously awful debate performances.  He hasn’t had one lately, since he never agreed to another debate after the debacle in Philadelphia in April. 

It seems to me that he also has a higher bar to clear than Reagan did.  His opponents attempted to portray Reagan as dangerous and reckless in his ideas, but they did not have the advantage of using the same charge of inexperience against a former two-term governor (which would have been a bit rich coming from the Carter campaign in any case).  So far Obama has deflected this charge by making a perfectly reasonable argument that judgement matters more than long years in Washington, but the obvious counter to this argument is that Obama doesn’t have long years of experience in government of any kind and has had few occasions to demonstrate this judgement when actually in an official position to exercise it.  Strangely, this would matter a lot less if he were running a conventional me-too, “centrist” campaign, but he proposes to make a number of significant policy changes.  The more significant the departure (or just the perceived departure) from the status quo, the more powerful the “inexperience” charge becomes.  (This is a point Stark makes in his column.)  It doesn’t necessarily matter that he is advancing an agenda that is, on the whole, quite popular.  It becomes a question not of whether the candidate has the right proposals and policies, but whether he can be relied on to carry them out competently.  Competence, not ideology–this could, very ironically, effectively become the motto for the McCain campaign, despite the fact that McCain doesn’t have any record of judgement or competence and wears the same ideological blinders as Mr. Bush.  Then again, Hillary Clinton didn’t actually have a record of experience, but she managed to flog that issue for a full six months and made life very difficult for Obama.  After the last eight years, the desire for a competent administration, even one that does not pursue the policies that one would like in every or most areas, may be very strong, especially among those voters who do not yet have strong preferences for one of the candidates.   

Contrary to what has often been said during the last few months, I think the general election is going to turn even more on matters of biography and personality than the nomination fight did.  During the primaries, the relative lack of policy differences between Clinton and Obama made the campaign fairly biography- and character-oriented, but I would suggest that the greater the policy differences between the candidates the more important matters of biography and character are going to become.  Counterintuitively, this is why Obama’s need for a series of pivotal moments to persuade the public that he can be trusted with the Presidency is more dangerous for him than it was for other relative newcomers to the national scene, because he is proposing enough of a significant change in course that he will have to be especially persuasive and he will probably have to do it in a format (i.e., in debates) where he has been much weaker. 

This is really what the “inexperence” charge comes down to: who are you, what have you done and why should I trust you?  In his decades in the House and the Senate, McCain has accomplished relatively little, and he has taken leadership roles on legislation mostly in the last decade as he has been building his national profile for the sake of his two presidential runs,  but he has very effectively used the media to define himself as he wants to be portrayed that has created the illusion that he is a trustworthy teller of truths and opponent of corruption.  Those who talk about the paucity or length of Obama’s legislative record ultimately miss the point.  McCain’s record won’t bear much scrutiny, either, if one is looking for meaningful accomplishments.  Yet the number of co-sponsored bills and passed legislative acts is almost beside the point, and only interest groups, activists and obsessive political junkies will pay attention to these anyway. 

As frustrating as it is to watch, because it often yields horrible results later, presidential elections turn not just on which candidate has shown “leadership,” but on which candidate can create the illusion that he has shown leadership when, in fact, he has done nothing particularly worthwhile.  Thus Bush sold himself as a governor who worked well with the opposition (never mind that his position was constitutionally very weak), and then won re-election on the basis of perpetuating a war he had started.  Bizarrely, Bush’s remarkable inability to adapt and his tendency to embark on ill-conceived crusades was taken as proof of deeply-held conviction and a willingness to act, which somehow proved that he was more of a “leader” than the overly deliberative Kerry.  Looking at the general election match-up between McCain and Obama, I get a cold, dreadful feeling of deja vu.  

McCain will weave an absurd story about himself in which he has played the heroic corruption-fighter and outspoken defender of unpopular causes (even though these causes are usually always very popular with his most important constituency, journalists), while the very nature of Obama’s swift ascension through the political ranks suggests, in the words of John Kass, “a guy who, as we say in Chicago, won’t make no waves and won’t back no losers.”  That was Tom Bevan‘s point earlier this week.  At the same time, it is easy to imagine that Obama’s virtue of thoughfulness will be twisted into the flaw of indecisiveness.  I think this is the gamble the McCain campaign is making when they make a major issue out of Obama’s willingness to enter into talks with “rogue” governments.  The policy idea itself makes sense under certain circumstances, and McCain risks revealing again just how attached he is to the administration’s failed foreign policy approach, but I am guessing McCain thinks that if he can portray Obama as the candidate of talk and set himself up as the candidate of action (as meaningless and misleading as this dichotomy actually is) that he will prevail in the election.  If he can thereby goad Obama into making additional rash promises to be willing to “take action” (against, say, Iran), he succeeds in blurring the differences between the two of them, which helps to undermine the theme of Obama’s campaign and make McCain’s own foreign policy views seem less extreme.    

Obama has often done worst of all in debates when confronted with the “gotcha” questions concerning various controversies, whether serious or absurd, and we have seen this reaction again in the latest flap over Jim Johnson.  When confronted with questions about his associates, he falls into his worst habit of playing the part of a dismissive, hyperean wise man who will not deign to lower himself to respond to such petty trivia…even when they are questions about the person running his vice presidential search committee.  “These aren’t folks who are working for me” might well become the “no controlling legal authority” meme that will haunt Obama for the next several months, because it does reveal something that Obama consistently does when challenged on his associations: first, he dismisses it as irrelevant or as a “distraction” (one of his preferred words), next he denies that the person is very closely tied to him, then he gets annoyed that people are asking him about such things, and finally the person leaves his campaign or he makes some statement distancing himself from them.  This is what all politicians do to one agree or another, but what may make it more significant in Obama’s case is this question of winning public trust.  If voters desperately want to depart from this administration’s policies, and they do, but they have reservations and are hesitant to vote in Obama, all these little episodes, perhaps not very important in isolation, gradually add up and create significant resistance to the candidate.