Health Class With Professor Obama

The biggest knock on Barack Obama is that he’s short on substance. This comes from his opponents, like John Edwards, who says it in public, and from Hillary Clinton supporters, who say it in private…

But putting out detailed white papers isn’t the only way to show your substance. Obama likes to strut his policy stuff by playing the professor. After 10 years teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago and several before that running meetings as a community organiser, he’s highly skilled at talking to an audience in a way that exposes his knowledge. He did this at the two health-care forums he moderated last week. I was at the first in Portsmouth…Seated on a stool in the middle of an audience of 200, Obama listened to one depressing story after another from people who had no insurance, bills that had bankrupted them, sudden losses of coverage, or only enough money to pay for the thinnest catastrophic policy… Obama had clearly done his homework on this subject. He regularly offered facts: Two-thirds of the uninsured are employed; 20 per cent to 30 per cent of the $ 2 trillion spent annually on health care goes to paperwork and red tape. He occasionally referred to index cards to prompt the audience with questions about employer-based plans or their tolerance for possible tax increases. He appeared to be listening so intently that he neglected to laugh when one of the speakers made a joke.

Those who aren’t already committed get to watch Obama think. Voters see how he assesses issues, balances competing priorities, and formulates conclusions. This is not just interesting, but necessary in evaluating a first-term senator with a truncated record.

Excerpted from a piece by John Dickerson on Slate, April 9