It’s easy to make the case that Barack Obama shouldn’t run for president in 2008. He hasn’t quite finished his first year in the Senate, he has no foreign policy experience, and not incidentally, he’s said he doesn’t want to.
But that’s no fun at all. TNR’s Ryan Lizza today makes a surprisingly compelling argument that Obama not only should run for president in ’08, but must run.
Lizza’s point is not necessarily about finding the anti-Hillary or taking advantage of Obama’s unique personal traits, but rather emphasizes the significance of timing. As Lizza sees it, Obama needs to run immediately before the Senate ruins his chances forever. As he sees it, 2008 may be Obama’s only shot at the job.
Obama, you may remember, is the lanky 44-year-old from Illinois elected to the Senate last year. He is the most promising politician in America, and eventually he is going to run for president. The case for running now is not that it is the perfect moment for him to run. It’s not. It is just that it may be the best chance he will ever get.
The main objection to an Obama run is his obvious lack of experience. He needs at least a full Senate term before he is taken seriously, the argument goes. On the one hand, each day spent in the Senate gives Obama more experience and stature for his inevitable presidential campaign. But each day also brings with it an accumulation of tough votes, the temptations of bad compromises, potentially perilous interactions with lobbyists, and all the other behaviors necessary to operate as a successful senator. At some unknowable date in the future, remaining in the Senate will reach a point of diminishing returns for Obama. The experience gained by being a good senator will start to be outweighed by the staleness acquired by staying in Washington.
There’s no way for Obama to know when he will reach this point. That uncertainty makes 2008 look like his best opportunity.
If Obama waits until 2012, he faces the challenge of taking on an incumbent Republican or facing an incumbent Dem in primary. By 2016, he may have to face the 2012 winner. In either case, as Lizza notes, Obama will still have built up the kind of record that has made it so difficult for senators to even win their party’s nomination, better yet the presidency.
In a nutshell, Lizza’s argument can be summarized in six words: strike while the iron is hot.
The kind of political star power Obama has doesn’t last. My favorite law of American politics is that candidates have only 14 years to become president. That is their expiration date. The idea was conceived by a very smart political junkie who happens to be a senior aide to Vice President Cheney (don’t hold that against him), and the law was popularized in a column by Jonathan Rauch of National Journal. As Rauch put it, “With only one exception [Lyndon Johnson] since the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, no one has been elected president who took more than 14 years to climb from his first major elective office to election as either president or vice president.”
As Rauch showed, the majority of presidents since 1900 have fallen on the low end of this zero-to-fourteen-year spectrum: zero (Dwight Eisenhower, Herbert Hoover, William Howard Taft), two years (Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt), four years (Franklin Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge), and six years (George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, Warren Harding). The lesson is that Obama must strike while he is hot or risk fading into obscurity.
Lizza concedes the biggest obstacle to an Obama presidential campaign would be his lack of experience on national security. Fair enough. Reagan, Carter, and Clinton won without significant experience in world affairs, but it’s a post-9/11 era. But then again, did you happen to notice Obama’s excellent op-ed, co-written by Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Dick Lugar, on surplus and unguarded stocks of conventional arms in Asia, Europe, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East?
Is Obama too young? In 2008, Obama will be 47. In 1992, Bill Clinton was 46. In Obama too inexperienced? In 1998, when George W. Bush decided to run for president, he’d held public office for a total of four years. And considering the fact that the Texas Legislature is in session only once every other year, Bush had only really worked in government for two years before deciding he should be the nation’s chief executive.
It’s open to debate, but many see Obama as the most exciting senator since Bobby Kennedy — who ran for president after just four years in the Senate. Hmm.