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Barack Obama is ensconsed with professional Democratic policy types:
As Obama rapidly transitioned from a senator with less than three years in office to a presidential candidate who has delivered detailed policy speeches, he has assembled a personal think tank that easily outsizes any of the established Washington policy institutes that provide intellectual fodder for the political war of ideas.(…)
On foreign policy alone, some 200 experts are providing the Obama campaign with assistance of some sort, arranged into 20 subgroups. On the domestic front, more than 500 policy experts are contributing ideas, campaign aides said. Veterans of previous election campaigns say the scale of the policy operation resembles the full-blown effort candidates typically undertake for a general election campaign rather than the more stripped-down versions common for the primary season.
Given this, it certainly isn't surprising that the policy proposals coming from the Obama campaign are always in line with the most mundane, non-controversial policy ideas of the Democratic establishment. Mandated health care. Residual troops in Iraq. Cap and trade without a carbon tax. I am not really sure what "war of ideas" in which the Obama campaign is involved, since outside of the argument over nukes and his original opposition to the war, I can't think of a single policy where he is really challenging the rest of the Democratic field. And to have such an enormous policy shop certainly reinforces what Matt wrote last week about "his strategy is targeted at elites." If several hundred people are putting together your foreign policy alone, and most of your advisors came from establishment jobs including serving as aides to Robert Rubin, is it even possible to develop a distinct set of policy proposals? Public policy teams of this size are pretty much always going to arrive at so-called "consensus" options.
I think Obama's academic instincts are taking over here. I don't doubt that he finds formulating policy fascinating, especially as a contrast to what he has at times called the ridiculous and demeaning other aspects of a national campaign. However, coming from academia myself, I can say that in many ways it is the opposite of a political movement. Academia is covered in several overlapping layers of constant professional critique and evaluation, that it is virtually impossible to fully develop an idea outside the mainstream of current thought. Creativity is encouraged in so far as finding new means of applying existing ideas, but overall frameworks are rarely challenged. It is in this way that one will see Obama's campaign develop several different possibilities for residual force plans, for example, but you won't see the premise of residual forces seriously challenged itself.
Movements fundamentally challenge the status quo on major ideas of the day: worker's right, civil rights, the separation of church and state, etc. They also challenge the status quo of powerful institutions of the day, and in fact that is probably the main reason why they challenge the status quo of major ideas of the day. In terms of small donors, volunteers, and attendance at campaign rallies, the Obama campaign has already equaled the Dean campaign in terms of grassroots activism. However, there isn't the same challenge laid down against media and political establishment, and thus no major idea contrast as there seemed to be with the Dean campaign. Even if most of Dean's separation focused on strategic changes (small donors, fifty-state strategy, full throated opposition to Republicans, overthrowing the corporate media oligarchy, etc), it still had enough of a radical feel about it that, for a while, it was considered dangerous to your career in Washington to go to work for the Dean campaign. That clearly is not the case with the Obama campaign, which has apparently invested a huge amount of resources in becoming a wonkish, insidery "think tank" unto itself. This is the main reason why the Obama vs. Clinton narrative to this point has focused on personality issues, including the ever tiresome "change" verses "experience" argument. Neither campaign represents a challenge to the institutional status quo in the Democratic establishment. Perhaps that is necessary in order to win the party's nomination, but it also makes for a less than exciting campaign, not to mention a campaign that is doing little to build a broader movement.
For my money, the really exciting moments in primary campaigns are when elites feel threatened by outside forces, ala Dean in 2004 or Lamont in 2006. In 2008, the closest any candidate comes to threatening elites if John Edwards, but overall the major threats to elites are coming in the form of ideas like no residual forces (Richardson) and the carbon tax (Gore and Dodd). Given that many of the innovations of the progressive movement in 2003 have now been incorporated by virtually every campaign (large small donors operations, netroots outreach, blogs, house parties, etc), to make an impact on the 2008 campaign, new pressure points have to be found in the realm of policy instead. We can still make a difference in Congress by lining up behind a few candidates in primary challenges, but in the presidential campaign the challenge has to come from rejecting "consensus" policy ideas trickling out of the Democratic establishment, ala residual forces. Figuring out a way to be effective in this realm is where I intend to spend most of my energies for the remainder of the campaign.
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