Obama's Thoughtful Appeal

Until the Iowa caucuses catapulted Barack Obama to victory last week, it had been an article of faith among the politically aware that younger voters never turned up on election day. To say that your campaign would rely on youth was to admit that you had no chance of winning. Iowa would seems to have put the lie to that truism. Younger voters were simply waiting for a candidate that they could get behind, and Barack Obama is that candidate.

But as this article in the Atlantic Monthly points out, Obama's policy positions really aren't that different from his rivals. And his support seems to come from being the right kind of candidate at the right time, rather than being a true visionary.

For my money, and speaking as one of those "youth" voters that are so coveted by the Obama camp, the Illinois Senator's appeal lies not so much in his policy positions or his fortuitous timing but in his age. He is the first post-baby boomer to run a serious presidential campaign. And he may agree in principle with many of the other Democrats on questions of policy (incidentally I don't agree with them) but what sold me on the Obama for president idea was the thought process that led him there.

When Barack Obama espouses his opposition to the Iraq war, I don't hear him echoing the strains of the anti-Vietnam War movement. When Obama talks about improving the health care system, I don't hear a sigh of longing for Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. And when Obama speaks out on issues of race, I don't hear a an Al Sharptonesque (or for that matter Hillary Clintonesque) appeal to the Civil Rights movement.

That is not to say that these historical instances are to be ignored. Each has value and should be remembered. But remembered for what they really were, in historical memory. Too many of our public officials remember these movements and events in a personal sense. They don't 'think' about many of these issues, they 'feel' about them.

Barack Obama may have similar policy positions to the other Democrats in the field, but I don't think he arrived at them in the same way.