Obama Rejects Framing of Iraq Debate But Reinforces Clinton’s Framing of the Presidential Campaign

Yesterday, anticipation was mounting for Sen. Barack Obama’s ‘major policy address’ on Iraq in Clinton, IA. Fresh from the Senate hearing in which Obama challenged two prominent proponents of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy, many believed that Obama would use the speech as an opportunity to emerge as a leader in the Senate for ending the war this Fall.

Instead, Obama’s speech was another hypothetical “This is what I would do if I were already President” sort of affair. Just a few hours after the speech ended, prominent blogger Matt Stoller wrote a post with the headline “Obama Is Done.” Quoth Stoller:

Only a strategy that brings progressives, African-Americans, and young people can block a Clinton nomination, and that requires a real withdrawal strategy on Iraq and some real leadership. Obama, with his recent speech and his Oprah obsession, has now made it quite clear that his strategy is targeted at elites and that he will not pull this coalition together.

Obama’s speech failed to throw any red meat to the left. His argument was heavy on nuance, which isn’t what anti-war activists are looking for. The campaign’s apparent goal with the speech was to demonstrate sophistication. In messaging terms, it was in the “experience” box and not the “change” box. He would’ve been better served by rejecting that framing, largely pushed by the Clinton campaign, rather than playing into it.

In a conference call for bloggers immediately after Obama’s speech, Samantha Powers, a well-known foreign policy expert and professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School, singled out Obama’s rejection of a false “either/or” dichotomy in the mainstream Iraq war debate. “I find myself quite frustrated in recent months,” said Power of the apparent dichotomy between either staying the course with the surge or abandoning the region entirely, because those two simplistic alternatives are not our only options.

Obama’s position in a sense straddles the fence between those two positions: redeploy or withdraw one or two combat brigades a month, starting now; implement a diplomatic surge; force the Iraqi parliament and citizens to write a new Constitution in hopes that it would be better than the current one; leave an undisclosed number of residual forces based on what the Generals at the time recommend.

Obama is smart, and Power is a respected expert, but groundbreaking this ain’t. Fence-straddling is what politicians always do; it is “The Old Kind Of Politics,” as the pundits would say. Candidates are trained to reject “either/or” questions and try to reach some kind of middle ground in their answers all the time.

Perhaps Obama’s plan is the right one, and perhaps this is the smartest “Old Politics” answer ever crafted on this subject. It makes sense, and there are many reasons to believe that if Obama were president we would have a much better Iraq policy than what we have now. But “New Politics” doesn’t just require “Hope”; it also requires “Action” and “Change” (or so I’ve heard…).

The media may sound like it is looking for signs of “experience,” but the constituencies Obama would have been smart to court in this speech are looking for effectiveness. The netroots and the anti-war left are interested in which of their candidates would be the best president, for sure; but they are more interested right now in ending the war before January 2009. Fairly or unfairly, when Obama focused his speech only on the former question and never laid out his plans for the latter, it came off as a vain intellectual exercise.

This speech would’ve fit the mood better before Congress resumed and the Petraeus hearings hit the front page — maybe in the early Spring, when Obama announced his first big proposal for troop redeployment. Now, his constituency is beyond theory.

Where should the Senator go from here? Obama has not caused himself irreparable harm with the speech, despite Stoller’s assessment. If he votes the way the antiwar left wants him to vote for the rest of the session — and if he does so without waiting to see how everyone else is going to vote — no one will be angry at him.

But no one should run a campaign designed merely to avoid making people angry. Stoller correctly observes that Obama needs to gain traction among key constituencies to build a coalition that rivals Clinton’s nationally. In particular, perhaps, Obama should try harder for netroots and antiwar support.

In Iowa, however, Obama may have brought enough of the antiwar left on board already to feel secure in his status as the antiwar candidate. It remains to be seen how peace activists here will react, but Sen. Chris Dodd has already attacked Obama for failing to explain his specific legislative goals, and Gov. Bill Richardson has attacked him for proposing to leave residual troops in Iraq. Either of those candidates could stand to benefit from fallout from yesterday’s speech.