Matt Yglesias noted this morning that Barack Obama has been criticized, even by those sympathetic to him, for being somehow “insufficiently well-versed in policy matters.” Matt chalks this up to a lazy narrative: “Clinton is well-versed in policy but isn’t a charismatic figure, and Obama is charismatic so it ‘must’ be that he’s not well-versed in policy. He’s cool and she’s the nerd.” The narrative, of course, is bogus.
For one thing, these takes tend to have a certain vague quality to them and often are offered by people who don’t, themselves, have a particular aptitude for policy. I’ve never heard an anecdote that involved someone talking to Obama about some policy question and walking away feeling he had a notably poor grasp of the issue.
Meanwhile, this story is one of several narratives that seems to me to overlook his time in the Illinois State Senate. Obama didn’t have some vast army of staffers to rely on in that role, and he wasn’t just serving time there, either. He successfully authored and passed legislation and impressed a lot of Illinois progressives. Nor is the University of Chicago Law School in the habit of handing out teaching positions to dullards. […]
Last there’s the question of staff and advisors. The various smart people working with him on a whole variety of issues — starting with Samantha Power and Karen Kornbluh when he first got to the Senate and expanding ever since — don’t have any really compelling reasons to have been working with him unless they thought he was a smart, impressive person who was up to the task of doing a good job on the issues they care the most about.
All of this struck me as pretty compelling, until I saw Kevin Drum raise an interesting counter-point — that no one is actually making the argument that Matt is debunking. “There are no links in the post, and virtually everything I’ve ever read about Obama acknowledges that he’s scary smart and extremely well briefed,” Kevin said, adding, “Who are these people who think Obama is a policy naif?”
At first blush, I assumed Kevin was mistaken. After all, it seems like I hear the “Obama lacks policy chops” argument all the time. So, I checked The Google.
It turns out, Kevin seemed to be onto something. I searched for quite a few permutations — Obama with the words “lack specifics,” “weak details,” “thin details,” “all talk,” “lack substance,” “lack details,” etc. Oddly enough, I didn’t find nearly as much as I expected.
The AP ran an item criticizing Obama for providing “few details about how he would lead the country,” but that was last March, which in the context of the presidential campaign, might as well have been a century ago. There was a recent editorial in a Texas newspaper that recently said that Obama is “weak on details,” but the editorial itself wasn’t especially hard-hitting. The Hill recently ran a column knocking Obama’s “lack of specifics,” but it didn’t exactly get a lot of play.
It’s possible that there used to be more of these criticisms — Google seems to favor newer content — and that the negative critiques faded when they no longer made any sense, but after poking around for a while, I was pleasantly surprised that this knock on Obama, which never struck me as fair, wasn’t nearly as common as I expected.
That said, while Googling around, I did notice that the Obama “lacks specifics” charge was very common in blog comment sections (including mine). Perhaps that’s what led Matt (and me) to think the charge is common, while Kevin is right about the broader discussion.
Just a thought.
Update: As it turns out, just last night, on “60 Minutes,” Steve Kroft reported that Obama puts policy details “on his website, but not in his stump speech.” That’s true, of course, but who wants any presidential candidate in either party to combine speeches and white papers?
Second Update: Perhaps I spoke too soon? Time’s Mark Halperin writes today that one of Obama’s great advantages is “an electorate that seems oddly indifferent to conventional norms of preparedness for the job of commander-in-chief — and which appears even more indifferent to the existence (or absence) of detailed policy prescriptions despite the grave problems confronting the nation.” That’s pretty awful analysis given reality.