http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2007/07/obama-is-the-de.htmlObama is the Democrats' common sense 'liberal'By DeWayne Wickham
When Barack Obama announced his strategy for combating some of the most intractable problems afflicting urban blacks, he invoked the name of Robert F. Kennedy, the New York senator who was assassinated during his 1968 campaign for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination.
Kennedy, he said, looked at the poverty that wracked the Mississippi Delta and asked reporters, "How can a country like this allow it?"
But as Obama, the Illinois senator who hopes to become the Democratic Party's standard bearer in the 2008 presidential election, reeled off what he believes needs to be done to better the lives of urban blacks, I thought of another Kennedy.
Obama's prescription for healing impoverished urban communities is a mix of government programs. He pledged to link increases in the minimum wage to the cost of living index, to increase federal funding for education, and to provide affordable health care to all Americans.
This is what makes Obama a different kind of Democrat.
He's willing to contest the political right's characterization of what it means to be a liberal while challenging some of the Democratic Party's most loyal constituents to behave more responsibly. Like Kennedy, he's responding to attempts to make "liberal" a bad word not by hunkering down, but by standing tall. In so doing, he exhibits great courage — though it could come at a high cost politically.
"At a certain point, welfare got separated from the idea of work," Obama said. "There was the welfare rights movement, and people started talking as if you were just entitled to an income, whether you were trying or not. And ordinary working people — black and white — would hear that and say, 'Now hold on a second. I'm getting up at 4:30 in the morning and taking a bus two hours to get to a job, and you're telling me that you have a right to something,' and they resent it. Work has to be an important component of any anti-poverty agenda."
Imagine that, from a liberal.
While it's too soon to tell how voters will react to all of this, Obama's embrace — and definition — of the liberal label has raised the bar for his opponents in the race to become the Democratic Party's presidential candidate.
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