Last week Barack Obama got an uncomfortable lesson in why agonizingly long presidential campaigns benefit candidates and the voters who sort through them searching for a winner.
The week started poorly for the Democratic senator from Illinois and then got worse.
Invoking the sorry role of “Bloody Sunday” in America’s history of race, Obama told a Southern congregation how that event led to his birth: “There was something stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, Alabama, because some folks are willing to march across a bridge. So [my parents] got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born. So don’t tell me I don’t have a claim on Selma, Alabama. Don’t tell me I’m not coming home to Selma, Alabama.”
That was one rollicking good sound bite–but for the inconvenience that the senator was born in 1961, and Bloody Sunday occurred in 1965.
The ink had barely dried on that amusing footnote to history when The New York Times and thestreet.com broke a story potentially treacherous for Obama: Less than two months after he joined the Senate, the Times reported, a trust acting on his behalf “bought more than $50,000 worth of stock in two speculative companies whose major investors included some of his biggest political donors. One of the companies was a biotech concern that was starting to develop a drug to treat avian flu. In March 2005, two weeks after buying about $5,000 of its shares, Obama took the lead in a legislative push for more federal spending to battle the disease.”
The mere possibility that Obama was maneuvering to benefit his backers–and share in their profits–settled uneasily over Obama’s campaign. The key passage of the Times’ article synthesized the dilemma he suddenly faced:
“Obama has made ethics a signature issue. There is no evidence that any of his actions ended up benefiting either company during the roughly eight months that he owned the stocks. Even so, the stock purchases raise questions about how he could unwittingly come to invest in two relatively obscure companies, whose backers happened to include generous contributors to his political committees.”
And the week wasn’t over. “Obama pays 17-year-old parking tickets,” read the headline on a Reuters dispatch out of Boston. Turns out the candidate had settled some unfinished business from his law school days at Harvard: $420 in tickets plus a $73 auto excise tax.
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If this litany of stories tests your patience, you’re not alone. Some Americans will conclude that these are the silliest–or the most damning!–Obama factlets since word got around that his middle name is Hussein and a couple of distant ancestors may have owned slaves. Others doubtless think Obama is being roughed up by news organizations already tired of his candidacy. Still others see all of this as fresh proof that presidential campaigns are too long and too intrusive on candidates’ private affairs.
That last option is dead wrong–even though most of us often mouth that very complaint. Barack Obama should thank his lucky stars for last week. Every American voter should do the same.
Obama knew that as a candidate he’d get more intense scrutiny than beach photos of him in swim trunks.
This country forces its would-be presidents to run brutal gantlets. The weak ones don’t emerge giving an inaugural oath with one hand on a Bible. That honor goes only to the toughest contenders–the few who have demonstrated the strength, the grace and the decisiveness necessary to lead the world’s greatest superpower during a particularly dangerous epoch.
Put short, Obama’s bad week is what Americans do. We inspect the judgment, good or bad, that a candidate displays. We watch to see whether he or she is unflappable or thin-skinned. We decide which stories bother or hearten us–and which ones aren’t worth our time.
Above all, we prepare our presidents for a patently evident but rarely voiced truism about our highest office: Presidents spend much of their time fielding assaults on their beliefs, their actions, their integrity, their weaknesses, their qualities as humans.
Obama has enjoyed an extraordinary honeymoon with much of the American public since launching his campaign. It’s telling that he has fit so rapidly, so maturely, into our political mainstream. Just as it’s telling that he griped, so immaturely, about those beach photos. We voters drink it all in, we weigh each candidate, we make our choice.
Last week, Obama soldiered on. He explained his enthusiastic rewriting of Selma’s history by saying he meant the civil rights movement–not just one episode–had brought his parents together. He explained, plausibly, that he hadn’t known about the two obscure stocks he had owned, and never did anything to further the companies’ business interests. As for the old parking tickets–he paid them.
These stories may or may not have legs. One that clearly does: the Tribune’s disclosure last fall that he had a real estate relationship with federally indicted political fundraiser Antoin “Tony” Rezko. After that disclosure, Obama stepped away from Rezko and acknowledged that he’d made a mistake in judgment.
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Twenty months from now, American voters will select their next president. We can’t offer a guess more knowledgeable than bar talk as to whom he or she will be. We do, though, expect to find ourselves occasionally bemoaning the length of a campaign that, for several candidates, started the day after the 2004 election.
Whoever survives our long national gantlet will be tested but also ennobled. He or she will have come to know more about America’s soul. He or she will be sensitized to the needs and the triumphs of thousands of individual voters. He or she will be tough enough to order America’s military to stand down or, in some different kind of crisis, to hurriedly deploy our forces overseas.
He or she will be that tough because, if the toughness isn’t there innately, we as a people will instill it. The vetting isn’t pretty and, for the candidates, it isn’t fun. Barack Obama can lecture on that already–20 months before the rest of us get around to making our choice.
