In her NY Times column today, Maureen Dowd notes the incipient effort of some conservatives to discredit Senator Barack Obama by noting that not only is his last name a mere one letter different from “Osama,” but his middle name is Hussein. Dowd quotes Hussein-dropper Ed Rogers as denying that he was trying to link Obama to Saddam: “The context was, this guy’s a lightweight. Never have I seen so much swoon for so little biography.”
Lightweight? The guy was President of the Harvard Law Review. Although I haven’t been in touch with him in years, Obama was a year behind me in law school, and we took an advanced constitutional law seminar together. I have a hard time naming someone who had broader intellectual range or better judgment. To be sure, great academic minds have sometimes done poorly in public office. That’s the take-home point of David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest. And it’s clear from the context that
In a way, then, a very brief term in the Senate may be the ideal resume for a Presidential candidate. It provides enough national exposure to gain recognition but not enough of a record to tie the candidate down. Yes, I know that governors have done remarkably well in recent Presidential elections (Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Bush 2), but I find it hard to believe that Tom Vilsack or Bill Richardson will out-poll Obama. Of course, anything can happen, and Dorf on Law doesn’t endorse candidates (as if the candidates wanted such a kiss of death!), but from where I sit, it looks like being a lightweight Senator—in the sense of not being weighed down by long tenure in the Senate—is just the ticket, especially against a likely Republican nominee whose 20+ years of mostly very conservative votes will be hard to characterize as “maverick” once they come under close scrutiny.