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Fineman on Obama

... it was more than worth the brief discomfort to witness the scene: the lean figure of Obama, framed by the Greek revival capitol, its worn limestone golden in the morning sun; the young, multi-cultural crowd cheering for him; the echoes of Lincoln and the Heartland; the whistles of the freight trains.

America at its best.

It was inspiring and humbling. This, after all, was the very place in which Lincoln had warned that a nation divided against itself could not stand. It was here that the age-old argument over race reached toward its crescendo. And it is here that Obama began a campaign that might end that argument altogether-or so we can hope.

And yet if Obama’s candidacy winds up being about race and history, he won’t be the Democratic presidential nominee, let alone the 44th president of the United States, for he will have failed in his stated mission to unite the country.

He has to be about the future, and he knows it. He made several bold assertions about himself and his campaign as harbingers of change. His challenge now is to prove that the assertions are true, that they make sense and that they can help him win.

Let’s look at some of them:

...younger voters are notorious for not turning out to vote. If this strategic appeal is going to work, Obama is going to have to translate buzz into buzz saw, cutting through the apathy and inertia of younger voters on election day.The early Internet traffic is encouraging.

The new Web site his campaign went up with on the day of his announcement is state-of-the-art. More interesting, and perhaps important, has been the Obama traffic on Facebook. The campaign’s communications chief, Robert Gibbs, told me that the leading group on that site now has an astonishing 250,000 members. The second-largest has more than 50,000. Those people need to be converted into real-world activists.

...

Obama wants to run as a reformer, someone wary of the old ways and the old cash transactions. But however much he relies on the internet for small donations, he is going to need as much help from the “bundlers” as he can get his hands on-if for no other reason than Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is out to lock up the nomination early by building an overwhelming cash advantage.

Everybody knows what Hillary is up to—and no one will be surprised that the people who give money to her campaign have agendas of their own. That’s business as usual. Obama is promising something different, but can he really be different?

...

My sense from having spent some time with him is that he is a pretty strong guy—brilliant, something of a dreamer, but also someone who was taught early on (by his Indonesian step-father) to defend himself physically and who did not mind a school brawl when one came his way in a teenager in Hawaii.

He also likes to be liked. He likes to be seen as the inclusive one, the imperturbable one - the one with the best grades and the best manners. The good grandson.

If he wants to lead, he is going to have to get down and get nasty with Hillary, Edwards and the rest. He is going to have to say not only why he is qualified by his life and resume, but why they don’t measure up to the country’s needs.

He can’t just rely on the “better angels of our nature,” as Lincoln said in his first inaugural address. Obama is going to have to do something else Lincoln did: declare war. In Obama’s generation that means a three-front battle against American policy in Iraq, the Democratic establishment (Hillary) and against the status quo in Washington.