The New York Times | March 06, 2007
The conventional wisdom about Barack Obama is that he's smart and charismatic but so inexperienced that we should feel jittery about him in the Oval Office.
But that view is myopic. In some respects, Mr. Obama is far more experienced than other presidential candidates.
His experience as an antipoverty organizer in Chicago, for example, gives him a deep grasp of a crucial 21st-century challenge -- poverty in America -- that almost all politicians lack. He says that grass-roots experience
helps explain why he favors not only government spending programs, like early childhood education, but also cultural initiatives, like efforts to promote responsible fatherhood.
In foreign policy as well, Mr. Obama would bring to the White House an important experience that most other candidates lack: he has actually lived abroad. He spent four years as a child in Indonesia and attended schools in the Indonesian language, which he still speaks.
''I was a little Jakarta street kid,'' he said in a wide-ranging interview in his office (excerpts are on my blog,
www.nytimes.com/ontheground). He once got in trouble for making faces during Koran study classes in his elementary school, but a president is less likely to stereotype Muslims as fanatics -- and more likely to be aware of their nationalism -- if he once studied the Koran with them.
http://www.barackobama.com/2007/03/06/obama_man_of_the_world.php
