Last week, when Barack Obama announced his intention to set up
an exploratory committee to pursue a presidential run, he sounded
some timeless, if bland, themes:
“Our leaders in Washington seem incapable of working together in
a practical, common-sense way,” he said. “Politics has become so
bitter and partisan, so gummed up by money and influence, that we
can’t tackle the big problems that demand solutions.” Rhetorical
attacks on partisanship and corruption in Washington are standard
for presidential candidates. So is the theme of the outsider coming
to Washington to clean up the mess insiders have made:
“One thing that I’m convinced of,” Obama also said last week,
“is that people want something new.”
In our snarled political climate, such appeals are easy to
understand. After all, the idea of the outsider is stored deep in
American culture, from our revolution (led by the most
inside-outsiders in history) to the outlaw heroes of the West, from
Huck Finn and the Great Gatsby to Mr. Smith Goes to
Washington and film noirs and rock stars, and whatever was in
yesterday’s paper.
It’s also stored deep in our politics, though today the bar for
outsiderness is much lower; almost anyone can try on the label if
he isn’t serving in the present administration or the Congress.
That’s how John Edwards, a mere two years removed from Washington,
has cultivated his outsider status. While Obama is a
sitting senator, his brief tenure and his race make up for it. He
more than qualifies as an outsider by today’s standards.
Presidential candidates who pretend to be outsiders are bad
enough, but worse are the ones who are outsiders for real. They
have to learn everything on the job. Watching its outsider
president flail around, the country begins to wish it had given the
gig to the dull insider he defeated in November. Four years later
they re-elect the president, since he has become an insider and is
now their only protection from the uncertainties of a country
governed by his outsider opponent. Given a second term, the insider
president disappoints, and the nation turns to an outsider to clean
up the mess he has made. And so on.
DAVID AXELROD, A POLITICAL CONSULTANT who worked for Obama on his
Senate campaign and will be with him on his presidential quest as
well, was recently asked about the most difficult challenge of
running as an outsider. Axelrod replied that the challenge lay not
in overcoming “the skepticism of insiders” but rather in assuring
“good people that it’s safe to believe again, that you can suspend
your cynicism and invest your hopes in a campaign.”
Axelrod surely knows better. In reality, outside of national
calamities like great depressions or civil wars, getting Americans
to believe and be hopeful is not the most strenuous endeavor. In
America, where life for the vast majority of citizens is far from
bleak or mean in any material sense, it’s encouraging people to be
skeptical that is hard.
What’s hard is getting people to look at “outsider” candidates
and see them as self-aggrandizing newbies with insider ambitions —
or as self-aggrandizing insiders posing as outsiders. It’s getting
them to recognize, or remember, that the country’s institutions
were set up to make radical change difficult, ensuring that the
path of outsiders on white horses is a winding one, maybe even
“gummed up.” It’s reminding them that even if outsiders promise a
“new politics,” as they usually do in one form or another, they
will clutch to the old politics like a lifeline the moment they
take power.
We’re not getting a new politics anyway, whatever that would
mean. We’ll have to slog through the old politics and see if we can
prevail in the struggle we’re in despite being more unified against
each other than against the enemy. If any country can get away with
this, it’s America; and if there is anything that could spell our
defeat, it is this, too.
WHEN IT COMES TO RUNNING the Pentagon, managing foreign policy,
building and maintaining alliances, and the rest of it, being an
outsider is the sheerest rhetoric. Such work is for inside hands,
and always will be.
President Bush’s senior foreign policy advisors — compellingly
examined in James Mann’s 2004 book, Rise of the Vulcans —
were experienced insiders with ties to Washington leadership
circles going back as far as 30 years. When the Bush team took
office in 2001, some said that “the adults are back in charge,”
contrasting heavyweights like Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Powell with the
undistinguished foreign policy figures of the Clinton years. But
Bush and his Vulcans gave the country the Iraq war, and that has
made it easier than usual to give the word “insider” a bad name
(time will tell whether the war also gives “adults” a bad
name).
Emotions aside, though, if the venture in Iraq fails, its
failure will reflect the flawed planning that went into the
invasion and the aftermath; the strategic and tactical mistakes;
the assumptions about what the war might achieve; and perhaps most
of all, the “profligate self-doubt” of our political leaders.
It will not be an indictment of insiders, or excess Washington
experience, or lack of new ideas. On the contrary, the Vulcans,
though they were insiders, were also trying to shake up the
institutions they knew so well — insiders acting like outsiders,
you might say. And this is as much outsiderness as we need for the
time being.
In 2008, we’ll need more gray hair, not less; more humility and
gravitas; and we’ll need people who know how to work the levers of
power on day one. Though Bush’s foreign policy team had collective
experience spanning many decades, the president himself was a
neophyte. Six years in, it’s hard to argue for a repeat of that
formula.
I even have a campaign slogan for my older, wiser insider: “Vote
for me — I know where all the bodies are buried.”
He’d lose, of course, but he could always come back and run
again — as an outsider.
