Details on Barack Obama’s Views and Positions – and Why I Support Them

By Whitney Tilson, WTilson@T2PartnersLLC.com, 9/21/08

(To read why I’m support Barack Obama for President, see: www.tilsonfunds.com/Personal/Obama. To read my Obama blog, see: http://tilsononobama.blogspot.com)

Below are details on Obama’s views and positions (and why I support them) on a variety of issues such as foreign policy (especially Israel and Iraq), his economic plan, tax policy, healthcare, the environment, ending our dependence on oil, school reform and his overall worldview.

Views on How to Fix the Economy, Taxes, Energy, Good Government and the Need for Change in Washington

To better understand Obama’s views on various subjects, I’ve posted some of my favorite articles:

· With the economy in the dumps, the candidates’ economic plans are critical – and very, very different. I learned a lot from this lengthy NYT Magazine article about Obama's economic views and proposed policies -- and I like what I learned (click here).

· In this Op Ed in the WSJ, Obama's senior two economic advisors outline Obama's tax proposals -- decisively rebutting the hysterical nonsense out there -- and show what a disaster McCain's proposals would be (click here).

· Surely one of the most pressing issues in our country today is the fact that 45 million Americans don’t have health insurance and medical bills are one of the leading causes of bankruptcy. Obama is committed to universal health coverage, while McCain…well, read for yourself, here.

· Few things are more important to our future than reducing our dependence on foreign oil. In these three articles, Tom Friedman nails how our entire energy policy needs a 180-degree turnaround and McCain's hypocrisy on this issue (click here).

· I yearn for the day when there’s a President who actually believes in the importance of good government, which Obama clearly does. Here’s a column by Paul Krugman on the damage done by the Republicans (click here) and the NY Times editorial about the Department of the Interior scandal (click here).

· Overall, there’s a huge need for change in Washington, and it strains credulity to think that McCain and the Republicans are most likely to achieve it. Garrison Keillor captures this argument brilliantly in this article that begins:

“So the Republicans have decided to run against themselves. The bums have tiptoed out the back door and circled around to the front and started yelling, "Throw the bums out!" They've been running Washington like a well-oiled machine, to the point of inviting lobbyists into the back rooms to write the legislation, and now they are anti-establishment reformers dedicated to delivering us from themselves.”

School Reform

Obama recently gave a speech (posted here) in which he compellingly laid out the crisis in our public schools and, critically, was the most specific and the most bold he's been to date about what he would do about it as President. He really pushed the reform agenda and, in doing so, courageously took on the most powerful interest group in the Democratic Party, the teachers unions. Click here to read my blog post about this.

I think this is an issue he feels very strongly about because he’s black and our school system is failing black children to an especially alarming degree. I’ve posted a few pages from each of Obama’s two books in which he talks about this issue (Obamaonschoolreform-book1 and Obamaonschoolreform-book2). Here is an excerpt from Dreams from My Father:

“I decided it was time to take on public schools.

“It seemed like a natural issue for us. Segregation wasn’t much of an issue anymore; whites had all but abandoned the system. Neither was overcrowding, at least in black neighborhood high schools; only half the incoming students bothered to stick around for graduation. Otherwise, Chicago’s public schools remained in a state of perpetual crisis – annual budget shortfalls in the hundreds of millions; shortages of textbooks and toilet paper; a teachers’ union that went out on strike at least once every two years; a bloated bureaucracy and an indifferent state legislature. The more I learned about the system, the most convinced I became that school reform was the only possible solution for the plight of the young men I saw on the street; that without stable families, with no prospects for blue-collar work that could support a family of their own, education was their last best hope. And so in April, in between working on other issues, I developed an action plan for the organization and started peddling it to my leadership.

“The response was underwhelming.

“Some of it was a problem of self-interest, constituencies misaligned. Older church members told me they had already raised their children; younger parents, like Angela and Mary, sent their children to Catholic schools. The biggest source of resistance was rarely talked about, though – namely, the uncomfortable fact that every one of our churches was filled with teachers, principals, and district superintendents. Few of these educators sent their own children to public schools; they knew too much for that. But they would defend the status quo with the same skill and vigor as their white counterparts of two decades before. There wasn’t enough money to do the job right, they told me (which was certainly true). Efforts at reform – decentralization, say, or cutbacks in the bureaucracy – were part of a white effort to wrest back control (not so true). As for the students, well, they were impossible. Lazy. Unruly. Slow. Not the children’s fault, maybe, but certainly not the schools’. There may not be any back kids, Barack, but there sure are a lot of bad parents.

“In my mind, these conversations came to serve as a symbol of the unspoken settlement we had made since the 1960s, a settlement that allowed half of our children to advance even as the other half fell further behind. More than that, the conversations made me angry; and so despite lukewarm support from our board, Johnnie and I decided to go ahead and visit some of the area schools, hoping to drum up a constituency beyond the young parents of Altgeld.”

Overall Worldview, Why He Is a Democrat and a Critique of Democrats

Some people say they don’t feel like they know Obama and that he’s a risky choice, but if one reads his books, I think it’s easy to get a clear picture of the man. Below are excerpts from Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope (both books are great, but I recognize that most people won’t have time to read them):

The first excerpt (Obamaoverview) is from the prologue and the first two chapters of The Audacity of Hope and outlines his general worldview. The key paragraph is this one – after establishing why he is a Democrat, he writes:

“But that is not all that I am. I also think my party can be smug, detached, and dogmatic at times. I believe in the free market, competition, and entrepreneurship, and think no small number of government programs don’t work as advertised. I wish the country had fewer lawyers and more engineers. I think America has more often been a force for good than for ill in the world; I carry few illusions about our enemies, and revere the courage and competence of our military. I reject a politics that is based solely on racial identity, gender identity, sexual orientation, or victimhood generally. I think much of what ails the inner city involves a breakdown in culture that will not be cured by money alone, and that our values and spiritual life matter at least as much as our GDP.”

Israel

Some Jews have expressed concerns that Obama will not be a strong friend of Israel. With a Jewish wife and three Jewish daughters (I just got back from a 10-day trip to Israel, in fact), this is an important issue to me as well – and I’m convinced that we have nothing to worry about. Read this blog post for further thoughts.

Foreign Policy

I am terribly concerned that we have lost our standing in the world, which is having deleterious effects on our national security and in many other areas. Nick Kristof wrote a brilliant column (click here) on how our entire approach to the rest of the world needs a 180-degree turnaround, which will only happen under Obama.

Obama writes extensively in The Audacity of Hope about his views on foreign policy and how he would handle the many challenges facing our country and the world. I urge you to read this excerpt (ObamaonIraq&foreignpolicy) and then decide whether his thinking and approach are sound.

In this excerpt, he shares some real wisdom about foreign affairs and how we should behave to achieve our objectives:

“The United States won the Cold War not simply because it outgunned the Soviet Union but because American values held sway in the court of international public opinion, which included those who lived within communist regimes. Even more than was true during the Cold War, the struggle against Islamic-based terrorism will be not simply a military campaign but a battle for public opinion in the Islamic world, among our allies, and in the United States. Osama bin Laden understands that he cannot defeat or even incapacitate the United States in a conventional war. What he and his allies can do is inflict enough pain to provoke a reaction of the sort we’ve seen in Iraq – a botched and ill-advised U.S. military incursion into a Muslim country, with in turn spurs on insurgencies based on religious sentiment and nationalist pride, which in turn necessitates a lengthy and difficult U.S. occupation, which in turn leads to an escalating death toll on the part of U.S. troops and the local civilian population. All of this fans anti-American sentiment among Muslims, increases the pool of potential terrorist recruits, and prompts the American public to question not only the war but also those policies the project us into the Islamic world in the first place.

“That’s the game plan for winning a war from a cave, and so far, at least, we are playing to script. To change that script, we’ll need to make sure that any exercise of American military power helps rather than hinders our broader goals: to incapacitate the destructive potential of terrorist networks and win this global battle of ideas.”

Later, after establishing our right to act unilaterally to defend ourselves against attack or imminent threats to our security, he writes:

“One we get beyond matters of self-defense, though, I’m convinced that it will almost always be in our strategic interest to act multilaterally rather than unilaterally when we use force around the world. By this, I do not mean that the UN Security Council – a body that in its structure and rules too often appears frozen in a Cold War-era time warp – should have a veto over our actions. Nor do I mean that we round up the United Kingdom and Togo and ten do what we please. Acting multilaterally means doing what George H.W. Bush and his team did in the first Gulf War – engaging in the hard diplomatic work of obtaining most of the world’s support for our actions, and making sure our actions serve to further internationally recognized norms.

“Why conduct ourselves in this way? Because nobody benefits more than we do from the observance of international ‘rules of the road.’ We can’t win converts to those rules if we act as if they apply to everyone but us. When the world’s sole superpower willingly restrains its power and abides by internationally agreed-upon standards of conduct, it sends a message that these are rules worth following, and robs terrorists and dictators of the argument that these rules are simply tools of American imperialism.”

Iraq

In the most important foreign policy decision in the past decade or more, whether to invade Iraq, he was right and Bush, McCain, etc. were wrong (I was wrong too, by the way). Here is what Obama said to a crowd of 2,000 people shortly before the war, at a time when opposing to the war was not the politically astute thing to do:

“What I could not support was ‘a dumb war, a rash war, a war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.’ And I said:

‘I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq with a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than the best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Qaeda.’

Despite this, he’s not pushing for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, recognizing that (from The Audacity of Hope):

“…all Americans – regardless of their views on the original decision to invade – have an interest in seeing a decent outcome in Iraq…It’s useful to remind ourselves that Osama bin Laden is not Ho Chi Minh, and that the treats facing the United States today are real, multiple, and potentially devastating. Our recent policies have made matters worse, but if we pulled out of Iraq tomorrow, the United States would still be a target, given its dominant position in the existing international order.”

For his latest plan for Iraq, see this column Obama published in mid-September.