Follow-up on Sen. Obama

I've heard from and talked to a number of people after my last email rant about Linda Darling-Hammond, Sen. Obama and education reform. A little time and being on the other side of the world (greetings from sunny and scenic Cape Town!) have mellowed me -- a little bit anyway. A few thoughts:

1) I continue to support Sen. Obama's candidacy and want to see him become President for all of the reasons I outlined in an email earlier this year (see www.tilsonfunds.com/Personal/Obama), in which I wrote:

I'm convinced that he is the real deal. Why? I think he:

1) Is highly intelligent;

2) Is a good listener and thinker and makes good decisions (which is not the same as being smart; see below);

3) Has a fundamental decency and empathy;

4) Has high integrity and is honest (with others and, more importantly, with himself);

5) Quickly admits his mistakes and fixes them;

6) Is not beholden to anyone;

7) Has the courage to say and do what he thinks is right;

8) Is, at his core, a moderate;

9) Tries his best to bring people together and appeal to common interests (and is very good at this);

10) Understands the enormous challenges facing our nation; and

11) Has a sound approach to thinking about these problems (although admittedly he's been light on the specifics).

2) I've done some checking and the answers to the two questions I posed in my last email are very clear: Sen. Obama is a very strong supporter of Teach for America and of charter schools.

3) No, Sen. Obama is not as bold and courageous as I wish he would be on education reform (and certain other issues), but the truth is that if he were, he'd be 50 points behind in the polls. My views are far from the mainstream on many issues, especially within the Democratic Party on school reform.

The fact that very few Democratic politicians are willing to champion a bold education reform agenda simply underscores how much work we reformers have to do -- and it's going to be a long struggle. As a quick example, check out the article in today's NYT (below) about how Democrats are rushing to bash NCLB, esp. this part:

Alan Young, president of the National Education Association affiliate in Des Moines, got some television exposure about a year ago when he addressed Mrs. Clinton during a town-hall-style meeting. Pointing out that she was on the Senate education committee, Mr. Young urged her "not to be too quick to reauthorize the law as is," but rather to rework its basic assumptions.

In the months since, Mr. Young said he has spoken about the law personally at campaign events with Mr. Richardson, John Edwards and Senators Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Is is any surprise that Democratic candidates bash NCLB when there are teacher union members like Mr. Young at virtually every one of their campaign events, keeping up the drumbeat of criticism of NCLB, however self-serving and ill-founded?

Sen. Obama has shown real courage on a lot of issues, most importantly Iraq, when it was most assuredly not the popular thing to do in 2003. Here's another story recounted to me by a friend: earlier this year, Sen. Obama was meeting with a group of hedge fund managers and investment bankers in a Wall Street firm's conference room and was asked, "If elected, will you raise our taxes?" He looked around and replied, "Yes." Nothing more, no rationalizing, explaining, sucking up, etc. Just "Yes". Kudos!

4) Regarding the article I included in my last email, in which Krugman called Sen. Obama naive and an anti-change candidate, Jonathan Alter wrote a rebuttal in Newsweek that I think is compelling, which concludes:

To call Obama "anti-change," as Paul Krugman does, is anti-common sense. Leadership requires a mixture of confrontation and compromise, with room for the losers to save face. "They have to feel the heat to see the light," LBJ liked to say. That heat is best applied up close. In public. Across the big table.

5) Finally, here's a great article by Frank Rich in today's NYT:

For Mrs. Clinton, the failure of "experience" as a selling point was becoming apparent even as her husband continued to push it on Charlie Rose. Last week's ABC News-Washington Post poll in Iowa found that she clobbers Mr. Obama on the question of who has the most experience — 49 percent to 8 percent. But to little end. That same survey had Mr. Obama ahead by 4 points over all because, as this year's pervasive polling matchup has it, the electorate values change over experience.

The rabid hunger for change, it turns out, has made the very idea of experience as toxic as every other attribute of the Bush White House. The once-heralded notion of a C.E.O. presidency, overstocked with "tested" Washington and Fortune 500 executives like Cheney and Rumsfeld, is now in the toilet with Larry Craig. You couldn't push the pendulum further in the other direction than by supporting a candidate like Mr. Huckabee, who is blatantly unprepared to be president and whose most impressive battle has been with his weight. In a Rasmussen poll in Florida, Mr. Huckabee even did well among foreign-policy-minded Republicans whose most important issue is Iraq.

But for Mrs. Clinton, the problem isn't just that the Bush years have tarnished the notion that experience is a positive indicator of future performance. She has further devalued that sales pitch with her own inflated claims of what her experience has been. Ted Sorensen, the J.F.K. speechwriter now in the Obama camp, saw the backlash coming in a recent conversation I had with him after Mrs. Clinton had mocked Mr. Obama for counting his elementary-school years in Indonesia as an asset.

"Hillary should be careful about scoffing at other people's experience," Mr. Sorensen said. "It's not as if the process of osmosis gives her presidential qualities by physical proximity."

Whatever Mrs. Clinton's experience as first lady or senator, what matters most in any case is not its sheer volume, that 35 years she keeps citing. It's what she did or did not learn along the way that counts.

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Democrats Make Bush School Act an Election Issue

By SAM DILLON

Published: December 23, 2007

www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/us/politics/23child.html

WASHINGTON — Teachers cheered Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton when she stepped before them last month at an elementary school in Waterloo, Iowa, and said she would "end" the No Child Left Behind Act because it was "just not working."

Mrs. Clinton is not the only presidential candidate who has found attacking the act, President Bush's signature education law, to be a crowd pleaser — all the Democrats have taken pokes. Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico has said he wants to "scrap" the law. Senator Barack Obama has called for a "fundamental" overhaul. And John Edwards criticizes the law as emphasizing testing over teaching. "You don't make a hog fatter by weighing it," he said recently while campaigning in Iowa.

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Confrontation Doesn't Work

Why Obama's approach to healthcare isn't naive.

By Jonathan Alter

Newsweek Web Exclusive

Updated: 10:41 AM ET Dec 19, 2007

http://www.newsweek.com/id/80882

Paul Krugman is a brilliant Princeton economist and fine columnist for The New York Times who was far ahead of the pack in asserting that George W. Bush is a total disaster as president. His clarity in explaining what academics call "political economy" is without peer. But his attack on Barack Obama on December 17 was wrong on history, wrong on politics and wrong on what the future holds for Obama's "big table" idea.

Krugman calls Obama "naïve" and an "anti-change candidate" because he favors bringing all of the players in the health care debate around a "big table" and rejects the populist message of John Edwards, who is apparently Krugman's choice for president. "Anyone who thinks the next president can achieve real change without bitter confrontation is living in a fantasy world," Krugman writes, endorsing Edwards's view that the insurance and drug industries should be excluded from any talks on health care reform because they stand to lose profits.

The columnist and his candidate both believe that Franklin D. Roosevelt succeeded by being a polarizing figure. I studied FDR for four years while writing a book about him, and this is simply untrue. It's also untrue of other successful Democratic presidents and for a simple reason: "Bitter confrontation" simply doesn't work in policy-making.

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December 23, 2007

Op-Ed Columnist

A Résumé Can't Buy You Love

By FRANK RICH

www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/opinion/23rich.html

WE can only imagine what is going on inside John McCain's head when he contemplates Mike Huckabee. It can't be pretty. No presidential candidate in either party has more experience in matters of war than the Arizona senator, and yet in a wartime election he is being outpaced by a guy who has zero experience and is proud of it.

"I may not be the expert that some people are on foreign policy," Mr. Huckabee joked to Don Imus, "but I did stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night." So much for the gravitas points earned during a five-and-a-half year stay at the Hanoi Hilton.

But if Mr. McCain has so far resisted slapping down the upstart in his party, Bill Clinton has shown no such self-restraint about Barack Obama. Early this month the former president criticized the press for not sufficiently covering the candidates' "record in public life" and thereby making "people think experience is irrelevant." His pique boiled over on Charlie Rose's show on Dec. 14, when he made his now-famous claim that the 2008 election will be a referendum on whether "no experience matters." He insinuated that Mr. Obama was tantamount to "a gifted television commentator" and likened a potential Obama presidency to a roll of the dice.

Attention Bill Clinton: If that's what this election is about, it's already over. No matter how much Hillary Clinton, Mr. McCain or Rudy Giuliani brag about being tested and vetted, it's not experience that will be decisive in determining the next president.