Master of Washington?

Three Obama videos are making the rounds. You can see them here, here and here.

Two of them are from an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle in January of this year; the other is from an Iowa Public Television interview in November, 2007. Now, the usual caveats apply; these are snippets, not the whole interviews, and the people who put these out are clearly not friends of Obama's. Still, taken as a whole, they present an interesting look at Obama's energy proposals and the effect, at least initially, he expects them to have on the market.

My first impression is that Obama ought to stay the hell out of San Francisco because it clearly isn't helping his campaign.

My second impression is that this is Obama the Professor in full lecture mode. While he says in the one video that he thinks the voters "understand it" he clearly doesn't believe it because he follows it up immediately by saying that the government must send "price signals" in order in order to change behavior. Obviously, not enough voters "understand" because if they did, the "price signals" would be unnecessary.

In the videos, he is, in effect, telling us that there is some medicine coming that we need to take and we're not going to like it. Ultimately, it will turn out for the good but in the short run it's going to be painful. In some respects, this sounds similar to Joe Biden's warning of how Obama will need support because it's "not gonna be apparent that we're right".

To say the least, it will be interesting to see how Obama would go about "mobilizing a citizenry" in order to "force their representatives to do the right thing". Assuming, of course, that enough of us agree with him about just what the right thing is.