Yglesias challenges the criticism that Obama is not wonkish or detail-oriented enough, and makes one of the better arguments on this point that I’ve seen:

Unlike dynasts like George W. Bush or Hillary Clinton or ex-veeps like George H.W. Bush or Al Gore, Obama hasn’t had the luxury of simply inheriting a vast apparatus by default, he’s had to build it himself. That’s hard to do if experts come away from talking with you worried that you don’t know what you’re talking about.  

I have criticised Obama in these terms, particularly with respect to the speeches that everyone else seems to find so deeply stirring and impressive, noting that these speeches are largely devoid of content.  Arguably, Obama can be wonkish and detail-oriented, and he has demonstrated some of this during the debates.  Yet many observers have noticed that Obama can either be inspiring in his gaseous, empty hopemongering in his major speeches or he can be more substantive and rather dull in his delivery on the stump or in a debate.  You might say that different venues require different kinds of rhetoric, and different occasions call for different kinds of answers, which may be true, but I think what Yglesias misses is that the criticism he is answering is not aimed at Obama‘s intelligence and knowledge as much as it is at the intelligence and standards of Obama’s audience.  That is, Obama is rallying millions of people behind him not on the strength or quality of his policy ideas, about which many of his supporters haven’t the first clue, but by throwing out insubstantial boilerplate about change and transformation.  It is Obama the orator, not Obama the former law school professor, who has made the campaign the success that it is, so while Obama may be personally well-versed in policy details he does best as a candidate and secures the level of support he does through oratory that “uplifts” and actually says very little.  You could say that this is true of most supporters of all candidates, but the degree to which Obama wins over voters through sheer “uplift” is so much greater that it stands out as unique in this cycle.   

Ultimately, whether or not he is capable of being wonkish is almost beside the point, and it may be a liability for national candidates, especially “change” candidates, to appear to be too familiar with the inner workings of the government apparatus.  Behind my criticism of Obama’s largely content-free speeches is the assumption that if most people heard his actual policy addresses they would run quickly in the other direction.  (The people who pay attention to the substance of his foreign policy views and feel drawn to him are some of the most hawkish interventionists; his antiwar supporters’ skins would crawl if they realised how popular he is with such people.)  Obama remains as popular and appealing as he is because most people who have heard him speak have never heard him say much about what he would do concretely (except maybe end the war in Iraq, which most Americans support).  Those of us who have looked at what he actually says on non-Iraq foreign policy, for instance, see that he can be reasonably well-informed and yet come to some absolutely dreadful conclusions.    

P.S.  Here is Obama’s policy booklet, which is littered with the verbs “require” and “ensure,” which are other ways of saying, “imposing additional mandates and regulations.”  You’ll notice that he doesn’t talk about these things in his speeches, many of which would raise costs in the very areas where he proposes to reduce them.  Meanwhile, “ensuring” that health care is made more affordable implies either limiting access (which Obama rules out) or increasing federal spending.  For all of the alleged wonkishness of his “blueprint,” I see no explanations of how to pay for any of this, and he certainly won’t include that in his speeches.  On trade policy, he becomes ever more vague: “Obama believes that NAFTA and its potential were oversold to the American people. Obama will work with the leaders of Canada and Mexico to fix NAFTA so that it works for American workers.”  But if he is against CAFTA entirely, which he says he still is, how can NAFTA be fixed to meet this criterion?  Obama may have some idea what he means by this, but we have no more clue about it than when we started.  It seems to me that this is sort of “yes, but” affirmation of free trade that a national Democrat feels obliged to say when he doesn’t really believe in challenging free trade policy but who still wants support from workers.