Beyond the Dome

Barack Obama has always had a unique dilemma in this presidential campaign. He was basically pushed into the race — and perhaps let himself be pushed — not because he had a ton of Senate experience to brag about, but because his allies thought he was the best fit for the kind of Democrat voters would be looking for this year.

That may still turn out to be the case, depending on how excited you get about the tracking polls. (He’s inching back into a slight lead over John McCain, according to Gallup.) But the price Obama is paying for running so early is that his Senate record can only do him so much good. Whenever he tries to stretch it into something it’s not, like he has done in recent days on the economic stimulus package and Pell Grants, he risks looking silly.

Take the speeches he has been giving about the financial meltdown. For the past couple of days, Obama has been trying to suggest that he was ahead of the curve in his Senate work on the issue. Here’s what he said today in Espanola, New Mexico: “It was two years ago that I introduced legislation to stop mortgage transactions that promoted fraud, risk or abuse. It was one year ago that I called on our Treasury Secretary and our FED Chairman to bring every stakeholder together and find a solution to the subprime mortgage meltdown before it got worse.”

Well, yes, Obama did introduce a bill in February 2006, the “STOP FRAUD Act,” which would have defined mortgage fraud and imposed federal penalties against it. It was referred to the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, and has been collecting dust ever since. He gave one floor speech on the measure, but since he wasn’t on the committee, and Republicans were in charge then anyway, that was as far as things went.

And yes, Obama did write a letter in March 2007 to Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson, Jr. and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, warning of “grave concern in low-income communities about a potential coming wave of foreclosures” and calling for them to organize a summit with mortgage lenders, investors, regulators, and consumers to figure out what to do about it.

The thing is, though, senators write letters to federal regulators all the time without actually causing anything to happen. And since Obama was already on the campaign trail by that point, it wasn’t like he could invest a lot of time in following up.

It’s not that Obama is alone in trying to look like he sounded dire warnings in the Senate. McCain has done some hyping of his own in claiming that he had warned of problems with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac two years ago, when he really just signed onto a bill well after a government report issued a loud alarm about accounting problems.

But McCain isn’t the nominee who faces the most questions about his experience in national politics. Everyone knows McCain has other significant accomplishments, even if predicting the financial crisis isn’t one of them. It’s Obama who is having to reassure the voters that he has done important things in his political career.

Obama does have a few accomplishments he can genuinely brag about in the Senate — a role in last year’s ethics overhaul, a government transparency bill he co-wrote with Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, and a weapons nonproliferation law he co-wrote with Republican Sen. Richard G. Lugar of Indiana.

But those accomplishments have been picked over pretty thoroughly, and every time Obama tries to go beyond them, he unintentionally reminds people of how thin the material is from his Senate years. If voters choose Obama, they will base their vote on his other qualities — his ideas, intelligence, personality, charisma, maybe even the simple fact that he’s a Democrat. It’s not going to be because of the letters he wrote.