Above the Fray: Ryan Lizza article in GQ of Barack Obama

[illinoisprogressive]

This is an excerpt from a very good article on Obama. Ryan Lizza gives a great portrait of the person. He cuts through the Rock Star-Savior Image and gets to the real person and what the campaign is like and what happens behind the scenes.
It is a fair protrait but, not one that is a fan letter to Obama. Really worth the time to read.



It was getting near the end of a long day of interviews, stump speeches, and hours spent standing around in the sun answering detailed questions from Iowa caucus-goers, the most entitled voters in America. Obama seemed exhausted even before our conversation began. As he climbed into the car and looked at my recorder and open notebook, he made it clear he’d rather be anywhere else. “Because I haven’t been doing enough talking,” he said. “I think the opportunity to spend some more time talking is really outstanding.” Slowly, though, he became more engaged as he explained the damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t box his campaign was in. “My general view is that we should be very aggressive and have no qualms about being aggressive when it comes to counterpunching,” he said between bites of trail mix. “I am more skeptical about our efforts to initiate a fight that is more political than it is substantive.” This is what might be called the Obama doctrine: Don’t start a fight, but respond with overwhelming force when attacked. Early in the campaign, when Australian prime minister John Howard took a gratuitous swipe at Obama’s antiwar position, the senator came back much more viciously. “We have close to 140,000 troops on the ground now, and my understanding is that Mr. Howard has deployed 1,400,” he told reporters. “So if he’s ginned up to fight the good fight in Iraq, I would suggest that he call up another 20,000 Australians and send them to Iraq. Otherwise, it’s just a bunch of empty rhetoric.” During the second Democratic debate, Obama never took a shot at Hillary or Edwards, to the chagrin of some of his supporters, but when Edwards criticized Obama’s recent voting record on Iraq, Obama returned fire. “You’re about four-and-a-half years late on leadership on this issue,” he said, referring to Edwards’s pro-war record.

But it’s not clear that the counterpunch will be enough this time, and Obama seems to know it. “Finding that balance is hard,” he told me, “because one of the criticisms in the national press of me is, ‘Well, he may not be mean and tough enough for the rough-and-tumble of a presidential race.’ Well, it turns out we’ve had some sharp elbows once in a while. But then people are shocked, and they say, ‘Look, the guy’s not who we thought he was!’ ” With that, he threw his hands up in the air.

Part of the way the campaign deals with this bind is to separate the above-the-fray candidate from the dirty work of his operatives. Obama may be a once-in-a-generation politician, but his campaign is staffed with fairly conventional Democratic talent. This has bothered some of his old supporters. To vastly simplify Chicago politics, there is the machine, represented by the Daley family, and there are the reformers who have long challenged the machine. Obama’s political roots are with the reformers. As a community organizer, he regularly clashed with City Hall and local elected officials, and he taught poor South Side residents how to aggressively challenge their representatives. But when Obama crossed over to electoral politics, maintaining those antimachine credentials became more difficult. One of his oldest Chicago friends, Judson Miner, whose law firm Obama worked at for nearly ten years, told me his biggest disappointment was that Obama hired as his top strategist David Axelrod, a longtime Chicago consultant who got his start as a political strategist for the second Mayor Daley, a man Miner has spent much of his career working against. But even Miner seemed to understand this decision, even if he didn’t approve of it. “You don’t get to be where Barack is,” he told me with a sigh, “by being Mr. Goodie every day. Sometimes you do have to compromise your values.”

http://men.style.com/gq/features/full?id=content_5841&pageNum=7

http://men.style.com/gq/features/full?id=content_5841&pageNum=7

[TwilightGardener]

1. Thank you--required reading. A very balanced portrait.

[illinoisprogressive]

2. welcome. It is a riviting article about the human beneath the image.

[smalll]

3. Well I understand they're trying to make some kind of point about Obama with that headline -

But they shouldn't have gone with "Above the Fray" when he's solidly Number 2. :shrug:

[Grandrose]

4. Thank you for another fascinating article! (K&R)

Long, but worth the time.:thumbsup: :kick: