Mon Jan 28, 12:22 AM ET
USA TODAY
Any presidential candidate who has never been president is, in former president Bill Clinton's dig at Sen. Barack Obama, a "roll of the dice." When voters consider a non-incumbent, they're working with frustratingly incomplete information — just as they did, for instance, when they picked Clinton for president in 1992 or George W. Bush in 2000.
That seems particularly true of Obama, who vaulted back into strong contention for the Democratic nomination with his decisive victory Saturday in South Carolina's primary. Obama has been a national figure for little more than a year, and subject to high-intensity vetting for less time than that. By contrast, there's little voters don't know about Obama's chief rival, Sen. Hillary Clinton.
Most of what voters do know about Obama involves style more than substance. He's a charismatic speaker who promises to change the nation's divisive and often dysfunctional politics. His youth and energy have drawn comparisons to John F. Kennedy, whose daughter, Caroline, endorsed him on Sunday and whose brother Ted is expected to do so today. Obama is the first African-American candidate with a real shot at the presidency, an inspirational possibility in a nation with a legacy of racial discrimination.
But the presidency is obviously about more than inspiration. A week from tomorrow, voters in 22 more states have a major say in deciding whether Obama will be the Democratic nominee. USA TODAY doesn't endorse candidates, but this page often points out where we agree or disagree with them and raises questions we think voters should ask. In Obama's case, these include: As the candidate of "change," what changes does he want? Could he deliver them? Would he be the capable leader the nation needs to preside over wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a turbulent economy at home and a looming budgetary tsunami?
The record shows Obama to be a fairly doctrinaire liberal Democrat with a modest political r ésumé : eight years in the Illinois state senate and three as a U.S. senator. (Kennedy, by contrast, served 14 years in Congress before he was elected in 1960.) As with Hillary Clinton, his voting record gets very high marks from labor and liberal groups and very low grades from conservatives.
Besides Obama's broader pledge to change the tone of political discourse, many of the big policy changes he says he would make if he became president are also similar to Clinton's priorities: bring troops home from Iraq; push for some form of universal health insurance; scale back Bush's tax cuts; and create a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.
Legislatively, Obama, a Harvard Law School graduate, has proved himself to be an adept lawmaker who can sometimes work across party lines to build the sort of bipartisan coalitions he promises to construct. In the Illinois Senate, he took the lead on a controversial proposal to require police to videotape interrogations and confessions, in order to prevent beatings and false admissions. He doggedly won over police, Republican colleagues and even the Democratic governor, who signed the bill into law after initially signaling he would not.
Obama also played a lead role in bringing campaign-finance reform to the Illinois Legislature, helping to push through a significant disclosure rule and occasionally enduring derision and hostility from colleagues.
During his relatively brief tenure in the U.S. Senate, Obama has played a key role in crafting new ethics rules that put tough restrictions on lobbyists' ability to shower favors on lawmakers and required senators to disclose influential people who "bundle" campaign contributions for them.
On international affairs, while in Illinois, Obama wisely opposed the pre-emptive invasion of Iraq. But he has very little foreign policy experience, and rookie mistakes on the campaign trail suggest a potentially risky lack of sophistication at a time when that's indispensable. He seemed naive when he implied he'd meet with hostile foreign leaders without preconditions. He provoked needless controversy in Pakistan when he said he'd invade to chase terrorists if the Pakistanis did not. And he fumbled a question about whether it would be right to use nuclear weapons in Afghanistan or Pakistan, suggesting he didn't understand the subtle way in which presidents have to maintain ambiguity about nuclear warfare, no matter their real intentions.
Another area of concern is executive ability, one reason that voters have historically given the White House nod to governors over senators. Obama has never run anything larger than his Senate office or his presidential campaign. His self-deprecating modesty about his management skills — "I'm not an operating officer" — raises a nagging doubt about how effectively he'd manage the executive branch of government, which has nearly 2 million employees. Presidents shouldn't be micromanagers — early in his tenure, Jimmy Carter famously monitored the schedule for the White House tennis court — but deploying the bureaucracy in support of their agenda is an essential skill for presidents.
If Obama is his party's candidate, these and other questions will be chewed over endlessly in the many months until Election Day. But Super Tuesday, which could go a long way toward determining the Democratic nomination, is just eight days away. In that time, voters would do well to look beyond the unmistakable appeal of Obama's rhetoric and examine his record for clues as to what kind of president he would be.
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