Obama offers dose of hope BY CAROL MARIN

Obama offers dose of hope BY CAROL MARIN
Copyright by The Chicago Sun-Times
February 11, 2007


Barack Obama seems comfortable in his own skin, walking with an easy grace across the frozen grass of the Old State Capitol Saturday morning to tell a 16,000 strong, heavily-bundled throng what it already knew but yearned to hear him say anyway.

He's in.

Using the plural wherever possible, the junior senator from Illinois told those who came by bus and car from the four corners of the state that they were in it with him, it was their campaign too.

Critics will argue that Obama's declaration of presidential intent was long on inspiration but short on specifics.

And maybe that's right.

But in this country, where inspiration, like affordable health care, has been steadily slipping away, a dose of hope sure doesn't hurt.

A colleague of mine who listened to Obama's speech said he was feeling a little guilty.

Why, he wondered, did Obama's lack of government experience (eight years in the state Senate, just two in the U.S. Senate) not bother him the way George W. Bush's inexperience (eight years as governor) had?

Maybe because Obama sounds smart the way Bush never did. Maybe because down-home folksiness with a John Wayne swagger no longer flies with us, not in the wake of a war that won't end.

Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton managed the merger of style with substance. And though Reagan haters and Clinton bashers won't buy what I'm about to say, each man could lift the level of our national conversation.

That, too, is Obama's gift.

And Hillary Clinton's challenge.

As Obama was speaking in Springfield, CNN was reporting on Sen. Clinton campaigning in New Hampshire. She was at a town hall meeting. One very thoughtful man in the audience asked her to give a fuller explanation of why she supported the war for such a long time before, finally, speaking against it? That failure to fully explain herself, he gently suggested, was an obstacle even for people like him who admired her very much.

If only Clinton was comfortable in her own skin.

Her answer to his question was more brittle than forgiving, more forceful than full of feeling. She repeated what she now says all the time, that if she knew then what she knows now, she would never have supported George Bush's war. Then she attacked Bush.

Obama on Saturday did not.

Yes, he attacked failed policies and a futile war. But his message was a carefully crafted, eloquently delivered homily. Not a jeremiad of all that is wrong with America but a litany of its possibility.

Hillary Clinton, in announcing her exploratory committee, declared, “I'm in — and in to win.”

Singular, not plural.

Obama didn't speak of winning so much as of trying to transform. A mission, not a mandate.

Are their semantic choices significant?

It may well be that a man running for president can be more in touch with his feminine side than any woman who seeks to be commander-in-chief can afford to be seen in soft focus.

But I think it's more than that.

Both of these talented candidates as well as all the rest of the Democratic and Republican fields will offer their programs to fix what's broken in this country. Their ideas will be dissected and fiercely debated.

But Americans, certainly this time around, are crying out for someone who looks, sounds and feels like a leader.

Not a Decider.

Not a Divider.

But an Inspirer.

And that, right now, is what makes Obama magnetic.