Barack Obama is a US Senator from Illinois who has been touted as a possible presidential candidate for 2008. A couple of interested quotes have turned up in the past few days, one about him on the PBS News Hour and the other by him on MSNBC’s Meet the Press.
David Brooks of the NY Times made this comment to Jim Lehrer on the Newshour on Friday -
So why does he generate excitement? It’s because he has a deliberative mind. Whenever he sees an issue, he sees all sides of it, and then he works his way through.And, you know, I’ve had many conversations with him, and we disagree on most things. But you have a conversation with him, and you feel like he really understands your point of view. And he may differ, but he has a deliberative process that goes on in his mind.
And I think it’s because of his background. He comes from Kansas. He lived in Chicago. He lived in Hawaii. He lived in the Pacific. He’s got all these things coming through him in his life story, and he’s had to negotiate between them — poverty, Harvard Law School — and so he’s about negotiation.
And he may be young, but if you have that process going on, I think you’ll be able to magnify the knowledge you have.
Based on my very limited exposure to him, I certainly sense the deliberative thought process that Brooks identifies and I find it tremendously refreshing. That said, I suspect that there are probably a lot of areas in which I disagree with his political views. This comment he made to Tim Russert on Meet the Press this morning struck me as a little odd -
I think that the American people are historically a nonideological people. I think when we operate on the basis of common sense and pragmatism, we end up with better outcomes.
My view is that ideology, i.e. a coherent and intellectually rigorous set of philosophical principles that underpin one’s actions, is actually a fundamental requirement for sound long-term policy-making.
Video of the whole Meet the Press program can be found here.