Can't, Stop, Thinking About Obama...

Ben Wallace-Wells, who hired me for my first gig at The Washington Monthly, has a profile of Barack Obama in the latest Rolling Stone, and does a better job getting inside the Senator's head than most anyone I've seen. This particularly gave me some hope:

One of the biggest names to work with Obama is Samantha Power, the scholar and journalist who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. "In 2004, I came out of election night just completely depressed," Power says. "We thought Kerry would win and we'd all get a chance to change the world. But then it was like, 'Nah, same old thing.' " Obama gave her a place to channel her energy. She advised him on the genocide in Darfur, an issue that most politicians at the time were studiously avoiding. "He's a sponge," Power says. "He pushes so hard on policy ideas that fifteen minutes after you've started talking, he's sent you back to the drawing board. He doesn't get weighted down by the limits of American power, but he sees you have to grasp those limits in order to transcend them."

Power is part of a generation of thinkers who, like Obama, came of age after the Cold War. They worry about the problems created by globalization and believe that the most important issues America will confront in the future (terrorism, avian flu, global warming, bioweapons, the disease and nihilism that grow from concentrated poverty) will emanate from neglected and failed states (Afghanistan, the Congo, Sierra Leone). According to Susan Rice, a Brookings Institution scholar who serves as an informal adviser to Obama, their ideas come from the "profound conviction that we are interconnected, that poverty and conflict and health problems and autocracy and environmental degradation in faraway places have the potential to come back and bite us in the behind, and that we ignore such places and such people at our peril."

Over the past two years, Obama has come to adopt this worldview as his own...The foreign-policy initiatives he has fought for and passed have followed this model: He has secured money to fight avian flu, improve security in the Congo and safeguard Russian nuclear weapons. "My comment is not meant to be unkind to mainstream Democrats," says Lugar, "but it seems to me that Barack is studying issues that are very important for the country and for the world."

When I meet with Obama in his office, it becomes clear that his study of foreign policy has only deepened his belief in the potential of American power. "In Africa, you often see that the difference between a village where everybody eats and a village where people starve is government," he tells me. "One has a functioning government, and the other does not. Which is why it bothers me when I hear Grover Norquist or someone say that government is the enemy. They don't understand the fundamental role that government plays."

As I said in an earlier post, I think Obama's foreign policy instincts -- and at this point, it may be more precise to call them "theories" -- are sounder than those of any other Democrat in the race. His choice of advisors backs that up. And so too on domestic policy does he have some innovative and good people advising him -- notably Karen Kornbluh, who's among the most innovative young thinkers in the party. This, for now, is the essential confusion of Obama. If you want to look for evidence of his authenticity and promise, there's plenty to be found. If you're searching for proof of timidity and consensus-driven politics ("He has voted with conservatives on tort reform and industry-friendly provisions in the bankruptcy bill, and the troop-pullout bill he introduced in January was a late and unremarkable entry in the debate over Iraq"), there's plenty of that, as well.

So now, I guess, we wait.