I had two reactions to the first Obama-McCain debate the other day.
The first was, oh my God I can't believe we've got another Democratic candidate who stubbornly resists making decent hay out of the plentiful ammunition that his opponent leaves him, in all fairness, to attack him with. Where were Obama's slashing attacks on McCain over the economy, the Iraq War, Katrina, his campaign-suspension stunt, his vice presidential pick, and all the many other issues on which he's vulnerable? Why was he so bizarrely defensive about the surge? Why did he spend so much time defending himself, and so little attacking (true he got off a good statement or two but did not launch the sustained attacks McCain did).
On the other hand, as I digested the debate later, I began to feel like there is something different about Obama. In his calm even-temperedness there is strength. By remaining aloof from many of McCain's attacks, not even bothering to respond to them, he may have ultimately come across not as weak but as strong. In many ways these debates are interpersonal battles over who has "hand" (in the sense of "upper hand," from the Seinfeld episode). Kerry totally dominated Bush in their '04 debates, but Kerry's was a forced, uneasy, inauthentic domination compared to Obama's.
Perhaps, despite all the yelling and screaming by Democratic partisans such as myself for Obama to hit harder, attack better, and draw sharper differences between himself and the Republican, there isn't some wisdom in Obama's approach. For example, when I got the news that McCain was suspending his campaign and his participation in the debate due to the economic crisis, I thought Obama need to react much more forcefully than he did, because it really looked like McCain was taking control and acting like a genuine leader, while Obama was being passive. Well, look how that turned out; McCain was his own worst enemy; Obama sat back and let McCain make a fool of himself, while remaining -- again -- aloof and statesmanlike.
I think Obama is a Taoist. Taoism is a philosophy that, as I have seen it interpreted, suggests that life has a kind of "groove" to it, and you are best off going with the flow of that groove, because if you try to force things unnaturally, it is counterproductive. The Tao te Ching (which I have quoted before; my translation is a loose one by Stephen Mitchell) contains statements such as:
Do you have the patience to wait
till your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
till the right action arises by itself? (#15)
Therefore the Master
acts without doing anything
and teaches without saying anything.
Things arise and she lets them come;
things disappear and she lets them go.
She has but doesn't possess,
acts but doesn't expect.
When her work is done, she forgets it.
That is why it lasts forever (#2)
Nothing in the world
is as soft and yielding as water.
Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible,
nothing can surpass it.
The soft overcomes the hard
the gentle overcomes the rigid (#78)
Maybe I'm being willfully hopeful in a most un-Taoist manner here, and trying to force a silver lining upon a situation I'm dissatisfied with. But, these kinds of quotes suggest the kind of power that Obama may be conveying in what seems, at first glance, to be wimpiness.
Whether or not Obama is At One With The Tao, I do think that for any befuddled undecided voters who might have caught the debate -- people who might not have seen Obama in action in any kind of sustained way before -- I think he may have really impressed a lot of people with his personality. And at root, these presidential contests are still to a great extent personality contests.
