Obama's biggest obstacle

If he beats Clinton, he must heed a lesson from French politics to win it all.

from the February 7, 2008 edition

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The risk for Obama, should he win the nomination, is clear. He must hold together his base, while convincing the Democratic Party to walk his walk of grass-roots social change. Like Royal, Obama must respond to the great challenge of contemporary American politics by assembling a winning coalition behind a new vision for the left.

The challenge is to repair the discredited notion of public power for the common good. Republicans equate public power with high taxes and bridges to nowhere; Democrats equate public power with Guantánamo and legislators in the arms of lobbyists.

Obama's soaring talk of political renewal is so compelling precisely because he responds to this challenge. He does so, not with a 12-point plan from the incrementalist Democratic Leadership Council or a radical proposal to shoot all the lobbyists, but as an organizer trying build a new coalition among traditional progressive voters and those in the alienated center, including especially young voters, about a shared vision of public power in the common interest. Obama's coalition includes both the well-off young and the disaffected of all ages – a potentially powerful combination.

The primary season is turning into a slugfest for delegates, and that is where the Obama campaign will correctly put its attention. Yet if he wants to win in November as well as at the convention, Obama has to persuade not just the voters, but the party machine, of the rightness of his vision. The county and state-level Democratic Party leaders who have been working for Clinton will be essential players in any Obama victory.

The conventional challenge for Democrats in the general election is not to run too far to the left in the primary, but Obama is unconventional. He has already attracted voters of the center, as did Royal. His main risk is failing to convince the local leaders of the Democratic Party, not just Edward Kennedy. These local party leaders will not oppose him if he is the nominee, but many of them do not share his core beliefs about the character of grass-roots social change.

If he fails to use the primaries to persuade these potential allies, he may share Royal's fate in losing an election that could have been his to win.

• Pepper D. Culpepper is a professor of public policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. His latest book, edited with Peter Hall and Bruno Palier, is "Changing France: The Politics that Markets Make."

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