Obama's Moment of Truth

Obama’s Moment of Truth

The vacation is over. The difficult test of Rick Warren, the conservative pastor who on Saturday hosted the two presidential candidates in his California church, demonstrated something that’s becoming the norm in this campaign: it is Barack Obama who has to offer better proof of his ability, and it is Obama, not his rival John McCain, who is investigated with curiosity and suspicion on his true capacity to be the next president of the United States.

This is, therefore, the decisive moment for the senator from Illinois. There is one week left until the Democratic Convention, where Obama will establish the goals of his candidacy and unite the party around them, and two and a half months until the election. Now begins the phase in which he must convince the citizens that his enormous popularity goes hand in hand with his ability, and that he can handle a project and a team with the same kind of enthusiasm he aroused with his promise of change. In other words, this is the phase in which he must add prose to his pretty rhetoric.

This was not the scenario the Democrats, who would have preferred more talk about the work of George W. Bush and his Republican colleagues, wanted. The Republicans, who just a few months ago were dejected and faced with possibly losing the election in advance because of the unpopularity of the president and a bad economic situation, believe they might find success if the campaign focuses on Obama, on his past, on his race and on his inexperience, rather than McCain, his age, his relations with Bush and his ideology.

But, unless some surprise changes the course, this campaign appears already inexorably transformed into a referendum on Obama. This is, in part, a consequence of initial success of the Democratic candidate, who for months monopolized the media coverage. A recent Pew poll, which discovered that 48% of Americans had heard “too much” about Obama, showed that only 28% felt the same way about McCain.

Curiously, after a quarter of a century in Congress and with two presidential campaigns on his shoulders, the senator from Arizona, who will turn 72 this summer, is turning into the great unknown of this campaign.

It is Obama who has taken the initiative from the beginning, and so he bears, for the moment, the most meticulous scrutiny. If the polls remain unchanged for several weeks–between a two and four point advantage for Obama on average–it should not be interpreted as a success for the young senator (who in the last month, has spent scarcely ten days campaigning) but rather as his failure for not being able to obtain an overwhelming margin.

In reality, no one has managed such margins in past presidential elections. But we can ask exceptional things from Obama because, from the beginning, he has been a distinct candidate who offered a different horizon.

His own party colleagues are demanding he descend to the reality of daily worries and, specifically, his proposals. “It’s fine to tell people about hope and change, but you have to have plenty of concrete, pragmatic ideas,” said Democrat Ted Strickland, governor of Ohio, a very influential figure who supported Hillary Clinton in the primaries and who is fundamental in influencing the vote in that key region.

The New York Times interviewed fifteen Democratic leaders of similar authority and all agreed on the necessity for Obama to speak more directly with respect to economic problems. “Instead of giving big speeches at big stadiums, he needs to give straight-up 10-word answers to people at Wal-Mart about how he would improve their lives,” said the governor of Tennessee, Phil Bredesen.

Neither the polls nor the critics alarm the Obama team. “Democrats should take a deep breath and realize that there is a group of voters who won’t make up their mind about a candidate until deep in the fall,” said David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager. “And there are eighteen states that will be decided by two to four points.”

From the beginning, the strategy of the Obama campaign has not been affected by the surrounding buzz. At this time, the goal is to make Obama a candidate who can possible pull off victory in Republican states. There is no sign of anxiety to put Obama far ahead in the polls. The Obama team trusts that the impending Convention and full return of Obama to the electoral arena will be reflected in the polls. And they can still trust still, at this time, the focus will be to illuminate McCain’s vulnerabilities. As Democratic columnist Frank Rich wrote the other day, “polls are meaningless in the summers of election years. Especially this year, when there’s one candidate whose real story has yet to be fully told.”