PHILIP BURKE

From 1993 to 2004, Barack Obama taught at the University of Chicago Law School. According to his students, he was a gifted teacher. “If you had just a surface opinion, he would ask why you held it. He always dug deeper,” Barbara Blank, a lawyer—and a Republican—practicing in Washington, D.C., told me earlier this year. Another former student, Josh Pemstein, said, “He liked being challenged, and he liked challenging us, as well.” Perhaps unintentionally, Obama lapsed into his pedagogic persona during a recent visit to Agassiz Elementary School, in Ottumwa, Iowa. With seven weeks left before the Iowa caucuses—the curious ritual that this year really could set the course for the Democratic nomination and the 2008 election—Obama looked to relaunch his campaign and clarify his differences with his chief rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

It was teacher-parent conference day at Agassiz, and with the children away Obama, who was dressed in dark khakis and a blue shirt, had the school pretty much to himself. In one classroom, he acted as the host of a roundtable discussion on retirement policy. In the gymnasium, he gave a stump speech and took questions. After that, in another classroom, he sat for an interview, during which he tried to make the case for his candidacy. Obama began with foreign policy, but his theme was broader than any single issue; it amounted to the unembarrassed assertion that he is the only candidate willing to be wholly honest with voters.

“I think Hillary is committed to a much more conventional approach,” Obama said. “I believe that we face unconventional threats, and that is going to require a level of personal Presidential diplomacy that can repair the damage that’s been done by George Bush. I think that means the President being involved in talking directly to our enemies, and not just our friends, and being less worried about the conventions of, you know, who we meet with, and what level envoys are sent, and so forth.

“I think we have a very real difference on Iraq,” he went on, citing Clinton’s public statements and her support of the Senate resolution, co-sponsored by Joe Lieberman and Jon Kyl, which was intended to warn Iran about meddling in Iraq. “She believes that our force structure in Iraq should in part be designed to blunt the impact of Iran in Iraq. I think that is too broad a mission and I think sending that signal to the Bush Administration while they’re still in office potentially gives them cover to engage in more aggressive military action.”

As for domestic issues, Obama said, “Obviously, there are differences between health-care plans and energy plans, although they’re relatively modest. They’re more issues of emphasis than they are major ideological differences. I think the differences on domestic issues have more to do with what we think is needed to deliver on the promises that we’re making to the American people.” Obama, who was sticking more closely to talking points than he had in previous conversations, went on, “Hillary is running, in many ways, a textbook campaign. But it’s a textbook that I think is inadequate to the moment. It’s a textbook that says you don’t answer tough questions directly because it may make you a bigger target in the general election—that you tell people what they want to hear but avoid telling some hard truths.”

“Hard truths” could be the slogan for the re-started Obama campaign, which, until the October 30th Democratic debate in Philadelphia, had been viewed as listless and fading. (By contrast, Hillary Clinton was often called the inevitable nominee.) During that debate, Clinton’s performance was criticized as evasive and weak; Clinton herself acknowledged, “I wasn’t at my best.” Afterward, David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, summoning all the spin at his command, described the new, unfettered Obama: “The public is looking for someone who will level with them, even when it means telling them things that they don’t necessarily agree with or want to hear. They value honesty. They value candor. They value straightforwardness. They don’t want calculation and parsing. They don’t want someone who confers with their pollster on every move.”

Obama has begun to embrace positions that a generation of Democrats have been advised to avoid. The political “textbook” calls for a relatively inexperienced first-term senator to run hawkishly. Obama, whom Clinton criticized when he said that he would negotiate directly and without preconditions with America’s adversaries, now makes it a point to mention that he would sit down with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s President. On the question of torture, which Obama unequivocally opposes, the political temptation is to signal a willingness to show no mercy to our worst enemies, in much the way that Governor Bill Clinton, in his first campaign for President, returned to Arkansas for the execution of Rickey Ray Rector, a mentally disabled death-row inmate. On the increasingly perilous subject of illegal immigration, Obama favors issuing state driver’s licenses to undocumented workers, and tells voters, “We are not going to send twelve million people back home.” When discussing his energy plan, Obama says, “You can’t deal with global warming without, at least, on the front end, initially, seeing probably some spike in electricity prices,” and on Social Security he proposes what is, in effect, a large tax hike. These issues all have one thing in common: Hillary Clinton’s positions are artfully vague—aimed at surviving the general election—while Obama insists that it is more important to be forthcoming.

On Social Security, Clinton has avoided a detailed approach to fixing the system, which is expected to run out of money by the twenty-forties; for now, she would appoint a trusty “bipartisan commission” to recommend solutions. Obama proposes raising the ceiling on income that is subject to the payroll tax. As a political strategy, this appears to be a terrible idea. A potential crisis in the Social Security system is a long way off. Why, then, would a new President spend political capital on yet another tax hike when he will almost certainly seek to undo the Bush tax cuts for more immediate demands, like universal health care? When I asked Obama about this, he smiled and leaned forward, as if eager to explain that my premise was precisely the politically calibrated approach that he wanted to challenge. “What I think you’re asserting is that it makes sense for us to continue hiding the ball,” Obama said, “and not tell the American people the truth—”

I interrupted: “Politically it makes sense—”

He finished the sentence: “—to not tell people what we really think?”

Obama’s classroom lesson was not about Social Security but about the narrative of the Presidential campaign. “This is precisely the argument that I have with Senator Clinton,” Obama said. “This is what I mean by a textbook campaign. I think there is a conventional wisdom, and this is part of the reason I think Senator Clinton’s campaign has up until now been so well received by the national press.” In other words, political journalists have rewarded the Clinton campaign for its tactical proficiency rather than criticized it for policy inconsistencies.

I asked Obama whether he thought that journalists “respect” Clinton for being so good at politics. “Absolutely. I don’t think that—” he began, at which point Robert Gibbs, his communications director, interrupted to say that the correct word was “revere.” Obama smiled and added, “I think a classic example was when Adam Nagourney writes on the front page of the New York Times an admiring piece about how Hillary has finessed the fact that she voted for the war and gotten people to forget about it.” The article, which was co-written by Patrick Healy and published early last August with the headline “SLOWLY, CLINTON SHIFTS ON WAR, QUIETING FOES,” was hardly admiring. When I asked Nagourney about Obama’s contention, he replied in an e-mail, “This was a very straightforward and simple story: reporting the fact that Mrs. Clinton had repositioned herself on the war in a significant way, and had done so apparently unnoticed by the press and—dare I say?—her opponents.”