The headlines on the Obama campaign’s April surprise have been very positive, by and large.

Most outlets have been genuinely impressed with the depth and breadth of the candidate’s rapidly expanding small-donor base. And they have pointed to the fact that in essence Obama was competing against not just Hillary Clinton, but Bill Clinton as well, the largest single fundraiser the Democratic Party has ever known.

But not everyone is a convert.

Thoughtful VDB-reader Chris wants to know what all the fuss is about, really:

Dear Vermont Daily Briefing,

A question for you. I know you are enraptured with Obama, but while I like him, I’m not ready to vote him in as POTUS yet. The main thing he seems to offer is “Hope” with a capital H, or maybe a nebulous “New Way.”

Seems like he has had a chance to show how his way would be new by now? So far it seems to be just fuzzy and non-specific. Now he unveils his best move so far, a great political move, by the way, but it’s an inside-politics, define-then-beat-expectations tactic. Different how?

Am I missing something here, or is the soaring rhetoric just that good?

Can we do some kind of GMO/Clone/Civil Union thing and cross-pollinate Edwards’ policies onto Obama’s personality? And would that be legal in VT?

Yours,

Chris

An excellent suggestion. And no, it would not be legal.

But to the Substance Question, which will be the natural movement of the media’s interest, from this point forward.

Having showcased the phenomenon — the massive crowds, the 100,000 donors, many of whom are newcomers to the political process, not to mention the primary cycle — reporters will now be looking to parse the Obama Effect.

But before we leave the Effect itself, it’s worth pausing a moment to appreciate it. It’s easy to deride a candidate with mass appeal as either shallow or scary, Sonny Bono or Adolph Hitler.

But to a certain extent, politics is empathic in nature, building a connection to an audience that exceeds the bottom line. You can’t rally a nation during a Depression without it; you can’t send a man to the moon without it; and anyone who thinks we can provide Universal Health Care or restore our standing in the world or end the war in Iraq without it is dreaming. Dreaming and will never wake up.

So it means something that Obama can walk into Oakland, and rally ten thousand people, black, white, brown, yellow, red. And he can do that a year before the first primary.

By November this year, he’ll be holding rallies for fifty thousand, mark VDB’s words. And many of those people, as with his donors, will be the previously disaffected, the terminally disadvantaged.

But moving closer to substance. All campaigns are faced with a classic political Catch-22: the more detailed their policy releases, the more fire they draw in the run-up to election day.

Every campaign has to hit a certain level of specificity, or be mocked as substance-free, but each makes their own determination on how specific to get beyond that point, based on their particular situation.

Take Bill Clinton, circa 1992. As an unknown Governor from Arkansas, competing against policy wonks like Paul Tsongas, Clinton felt he had to show his chops. And so he released a highly detailed sheaf of policy papers, including a very intricate set of ideas on health care.

And George Stephanopoulos famously declared, “Specificity is the character issue this year.” Which was a handy reframing for obvious related reasons.

Take John Edwards, circa 2007. Struggling against two very powerful opponents, Edwards has clearly decided to move further left in a bid for party activists, and to roll out specifics earlier than he might otherwise have liked.

And the results have been predictable: Edwards’s call to raise taxes as a means of funding his health care plan has lost him party moderates, and garnered some bad press, but it has cemented the affection of health care die-hards.

Because of the Obama Effect itself, the junior Senator from Illinois is facing very early pressure to move to substance. In part, he is resisting that, and in part he is wise to do so.

It’s never a good idea to be moved out of your own timetable in a Presidential race, and in this case — with a very hungry Right-wing media cruising always just off the horizon — it could be disastrous to jump the gun.

All of this, of course, has been by way of reframing the question. But that’s not to say that Obama’s campaign has been substance-free. Far from it.

On the Iraq War, Obama likes to say that he has “opposed it from the start,” and he has: Obama spoke publicly, early and often, against Bush’s drive to invade Iraq. And that matters.

Why? If we’re going to repudiate the central tenets of Bush’s foreign policy, it’s best to be clear in doing so, as clear as we can get.

And to clarify his stance further, in January Obama introduced the Iraq War De-escalation Act of 2007. It commences redeployment of troops by May 1 this year, and it puts in place a process for having “all combat brigades” out of country by March 2008.

On the positive side, the legislation caps the number of troops at January 2007 levels; contains triggers for speeding up or slowing down deployment, with those triggers firmly in Congressional hands; and it anticipates the Iraq Study Group on diplomatic means to end the crisis.

On the negative side, Obama is not calling for defunding the war. And his legislation looks to leave a small number of troops in Iraq to conduct counter-insurgency, and the training of Iraqi forces. But nothing like the force strength that Hillary Clinton has talked about leaving in place to continue to occupy the Northwest sector of the country.

And in these positions Obama is all but indistinguishable from John Edwards, who also calls for bringing home all “combat troops” within a year.

But Obama has also been active on the voting question, and that’s key for VDB.

Republican operatives have flirted openly with questionable technologies over the last several years: touch-screen voting without verifiable vote counts or source codes; requiring additional picture ID’s in rural counties, where low-income voters might be disadvantaged; and phone-bank operations designed to harrass and annoy, and leave the impression that they are run by Democrats.

And Obama has been active on this front, at the national level. The Deceptive Practices and Voter Intimidation Prevention Act, which he introduced in the Senate, targets the broad spectrum of dirty tricks that the information age has made available to unscrupulous operators.

There is more, of course. If you saw Obama’s webcast on the 31st, you know he can more than hold his own on the intricate details of health care. And he’s called for universal health care for all Americans by the end of his first term.

But as the mainstream press points out, he has yet to say precisely how he will pay for it. Does that disqualify him, a year before the first primary? Hardly.

As we said above, Obama is engaged in managing a delicate balance: enough detail to attract activists, field workers, and those with important single issues, but not enough to leave himself open to a full year of pounding on the fine print.

See McGovern, George; Welfare Proposal; 1972 Campaign

And a pronounced hat tip to Chris, for throwing the debate into second gear.