"Look, one thing I'm very confident about is my judgment in foreign policy is, I believe, better than anyone else in this race, Republican or Democrat.
"And I don't base that simply on the fact that I was right on the war in Iraq. But if you look at how I approached the problem. What I was drawing on was a set of experiences that come from a life of living overseas, having family overseas, being able to see the world through the eyes of people outside our borders.
"The notion that somehow from Washington you get this vast foreign policy experience is illusory."
This passage form Obama is worth revisiting given the campaign events of the past day. Not only is Clinton attacking Obama for stating that he would meet with certain national leaders, but oddly enough Romney and McCain have both actually jumped to Clinton's defense, and attacked Obama for this, too. When have Republicans ever defended Clinton? Romney's response is worth noting in particular, as he has remarkably has managed to squeeze the Nazis and Communism into major public references to Democrats in one week.
"It's absolutely extraordinary that someone could be so out of touch with the nature of our world," Romney said of Obama. Romney scathingly added that Obama's philosophy mirrors that of Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister who promoted a policy of "appeasement" towards Nazi Germany in the years before World War II.
Now, my friend Peter Daou at the Clinton campaign understands the impact of both Democrats and Republicans attacking Obama for his position on meetings with foreign leaders as well as anyone in the country. As Daou noted in his seminal essay, The Triangle, this will cause conventional wisdom to close against Obama in the national media, pretty much no matter what we say online. And so it has! Check out this rather straightforward comment on the matter from the Washington Post:
The tussle could be a turning point in the Democratic race, which has seen little direct engagement between the top two candidates until now, and highlights how the competition between them has been framed: Clinton's experience vs. Obama's freshness.
For Obama, it also marked a plunge into charge-countercharge politics after a promise to run "a different kind of campaign."
Wow-it is very hard to imagine how a report on this incident could be written more to the liking of the Clinton campaign. First, with only slightly different wording, the Clinton campaign's general frame on the campaign--experience vs. not--is used as the baseline, "objective" description of the campaign itself, and then this latest "Fight!" is used as an example to reinforce that narrative. Some may argue that the first sentence comes equally close to Obama's framing of the campaign--same old vs. new voice--but I think the next sentence, which states that Obama is not "fresh" after all, makes such a reading difficult, at best. The story is clearly siding with the Clinton campaign's framing.
Now, I agree with Obama on meeting with foreign leaders as a means of trying to reduce tensions. I also have no doubt that Obama's views on meeting with foreign leaders who have, to put it one way, a "hostile" relationship with the United States, are derived from his formative experiences of living overseas. Obama might understand, better than most, that the, um, "unproductive" United States policy under Bush of not talking to leaders we don't like can easily be viewed around the world as a continuation of not working with pretty much any other nations at all on issues of major international importance at all. It is not difficult to see how this would cause us to appear aloof and exceptionalist in the eyes of many people around the world, and not just those who live under dictatorships. This does indeed strike me as an example of Obama's different perspective, and his framing on experience.
However, at the same time, I also think that this incident will almost certainly damage Obama, simply because he ran up against conservative conventional wisdom on an issue where progressives have made little headway in the national discourse. DLC-nexus conventional wisdom on meeting with certain foreign leaders is, in fact, identical to that of most Republicans and the Bush administration: don't meet with them as some strange form of "punishment." This will be a resource the Clinton campaign can draw upon, if it so chooses, virtually anytime she is attacked from the left, especially by Obama: Republican and Democratic surrogates closing the triangle against the progressive position. I think it also makes Obama's reaction more understandable, if still a little surprising. When the national political discourse has closed the triangle of conventional wisdom against progressives, virtually the only remaining option in a campaign is to make a direct appeal to progressives in their own language. And thus, Obama uses language we denizens of the progressive blogosphere have read repeatedly for over half a decade (emphasis mine):
"I'm not going to hide behind a bunch of rhetoric. I don't want a continuation with Bush-Cheney. I don't want Bush-Cheney light. I want a fundamental change."
It isn't exactly a state secret that describing centrist, DLC-nexus, or Clintonesque Democrats candidates as "Bush-Cheney light," or some variation thereof, is a longstanding practice in many progressive activist circles. If I had a dollar for every time I saw some variation on this line written in the blogosphere, I would have at least $18,300. I'm sure Obama has seen it written or heard it spoken many times, as well. Given this, just like Bush's odd comment about the Dred Scott case in the final debate with Kerry that actually meant he would only appoint anti-choice judges, I think the best way to read his comments are as a direct appeal to those progressives in their own language: aka, progressive dog whistle politics. Any commentary on whether or not it was a good move for Obama to say what he did should probably take that appeal into account. If he ends up receiving more of a boost from progressives on this than he was hurt among other voters, it will end up being a net gain for him. It will also be interesting to see if this is a use of language he will continue in the future.
Now, I don't think either of those last two scenarios are particularly likely to happen, especially the first one, but it will be worth watching.
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