Obama's Camouflage

If Barack Obama is to win the Democratic nomination for president, he will do so by defying one of the traditional rules of politics: debate when you're behind and avoid debates when you're in the lead.

A blogger on the Atlantic's Web site, Marc Ambinder, broke the news of Mr. Obama's opting to beg off campaign forums on Saturday. A posting by Mr. Obama's campaign manager, David Plouffe, followed on a campaign affiliated Web site. "Unfortunately, we simply cannot run the kind of campaign we want and need to, engaging with voters in the early states and February 5 states, if our schedule is dictated by dozens of forums and debates," Mr. Plouffe wrote. "Ultimately, the one group left out of the current schedule is the voters and they are the ones who ask the toughest questions and most deserve to have those questions answered face to face."

This type of language is generally reserved for a frontrunner afraid to lose a big lead. But Mr. Obama's not leading in the polls, although an American Research Group poll last month showed he and Senator Clinton tied at 31% in New Hampshire. Given that Mr. Obama does not have the traditional rationale to balk at debates — a big lead — something very unique is going on. It involves two things, one personal and one philosophical.

The personal aspect of Mr. Obama's decision to limit his debate performances is that they are a bad format for him. It is counterintuitive, almost perverse, but somehow this former president of the Harvard Law Review is a poor debater. This is not a man for whom verbal fluidity is an unknown quality. Still, it doesn't translate into verbal jousting. He may have announced his campaign in Springfield, Ill., hometown to Abraham Lincoln, whose name, along with his opponent Stephen Douglas, is synonymous with debating. But the debate is Mr. Obama's weakest format. He is halting, hesitant, and, sometimes, even haughty.

His participation in debates has taken his campaign off message. No better example exists than his answer at the YouTube debate evincing willingness to meet with Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during his first year in office. While his campaign worked mightily to use this as an opportunity to excite the Democratic Party's liberal base, overall the statement was a mistake.

Even when Mr. Obama performs better, as he did at ABC's debate in Iowa, he fails to shine. These debates, at which he must tangle with the likes of Senators Clinton, Dodd, and Biden, who have 67 years of combined experience among them, only serve to make him look like what he is, a man who has been in the Senate for less than three years.

Consider an answer he gave Sunday about plans for an American withdrawal from Iraq: "I think Joe [Biden] is right on the issue of how long this is going to take. This is not going to be a simple operation. I think Senator Clinton laid out some of the challenges that were out there. I agree with John Edwards that all of us on this stage I think would begin to bring this war to an end."

Mr. Obama's campaign is betting that Democratic Party voters will really respond to something new and different. On the stump, Mr. Obama is employing his neophyte status as a virtue. "Part of the traditional game in Washington is racking up endorsements," he said in Concord, N.H., last month. "We'll never have the most endorsements because we haven't been in Washington that long. We haven't traded that many favors."

At the same speech he invoked the same kind of rhetoric that the liberal Netroots activists believe about themselves, that they are some kind of organic movement. "Change of the sort we're talking about is not just going to happen because I get elected," he said. "Change is going to happen because all of you decide you're going to embrace change. Change is going to happen not from the top-down but from the bottom up."

At heart, Mr. Obama's campaign is a communal project, one in which he is attempting to bring together a cohort of well-meaning, latte-sipping, memoir-reading, touchy-feely voters, eager to change America and feel good about each other while doing it. As Mr. Obama told supporters at his speech in Concord, "it's tempting to think that it's all about me. But my wife says it's not. It's about you." In the memo announcing the decision to cut Mr. Obama's debate appearances, Mr. Plouffe stated his decision would give voters "an even greater sense of Barack's message of change." Mr. Obama, a former community organizer, might really believe it when he says, as he did in Concord, "if we have faith in the American people, in their common sense, in their decency, in their courage, in their willingness to embrace a new way of doing business, we're not just going to win an election people, we are going to transform a country."

It sounds like a snazzy way to camouflage a poor debater who lacks a deep grasp of the issues that typically are asked of a presidential candidate.

Mr. Gitell (gitell.com) is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.