From Inside the Beltway: Don't listen to what I say - watch what I do

[KoKo]

21. Samantha...interesting points

and I think many of us Dems have pondered both and even have a few theories of our own along with the two you postulate.

I wonder if we have focused too much on the "man" though and not those who got him into power. You mention Bill Clinton and that's maybe where we could find part of his backing and for Bill's own purposes now that he has his Clinton Global Initiative.

Obama was young when he ran so it's hard for me to see him as a brilliant politician in the way of JFK who came from a political family all the way back to his grandfather. I think we overlook that Obama's connections come from the Rockefeller or Ford Foundation...(sorry can't remember which one right now) where his mother was the beneficiary of grants and her son probably benefited from those connections as he grew older. His father was one of the chosen bright and promising students from Africa to come and study in the US. That money came from the Kennedy Foundation so there's a bit of connection there. But, it would be hard to believe that the Kennedys chose his father to produce Barack Obama...so no political grooming there until Ted and Caroline Kennedy latched onto him somewhere along the line.

Anyway, my ramble is that I think that Obama got where he did through good connections and lots of charm and certainly a great mind. But it's those who selected him to run that probably have and had much more influence than his own gifts as a politician. It's his backers that we might want to look at to try to understand why so many of us Democrats on the Left (I used to be a very mainstream Dem) expected more from him than he has delivered. He was to be the Democratic Hope (once again after Carter and Clinton) but he has seemed to be much more Reaganesque than we were led to believe. The Center for American Progress, The Nation and others seemed to push him as Left Left Leaning and not NeoLib and his being the first Black President some thought he would have a deep experience in the woes of this nation after the Bush years and the policies of Reagan that we couldn't seem to shake off. But, others of us also knew that his family background was far removed from the experiences of so many of our African Americans here in the states. So...his depth of experience about mainland US came from his mother and grandparents and not from personal experience. He grew up more of an International Kid of the Globe than a person who had gone through the rough and tumble of growing up in Georgia or Arkansas and making one's political way through those experiences.

Anyway, I don't know what Obama's core beliefs are. As David Remnick said to Charlie Rose in his interview about his New Yorker article about Obama... :"He travels light." This was in answer to Rose's question about who Obama was close to outside of his inner circle he's had since his Chicago days. Remnick was saying...there were few. So, we probably won't know whether its brilliant chess or poker he's playing or if he has handlers and advisers who do all the strategizing for him until the Presidential Historians do their work after his second term ends.