Barack Obama: The winner
Barack Obama will sweep aside John McCain and make history by becoming the first black US president, says Andrew Sullivan
I wonder if Americans have yet fully absorbed what they have just done. This past week - 41 years after the Supreme Court struck down the last bans on interracial marriage and only 40 years after black America exploded in riots after Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated - a black man became the favourite to be the next president of the United States.
His convention acceptance speech, a date scheduled long before Barack Obama became the Democratic nominee, will occur by exquisite timing 45 years to the day after King’s “I have a dream” speech. The states that were critical to his nomination were Illinois, Lincoln’s home state, and the four southern states most associated with slavery: South Carolina, Georgia, Virginia and North Carolina.
Much has been made, and rightly so, of how Obama’s rise changes America’s relationship to the rest of the world. What has been less appreciated is how deeply Obama’s victory alters America’s relationship to itself.
There is no deeper division in America than race. Slavery was America’s original sin. Even after its abolition, America was effectively in large swathes an apartheid society until the 1970s. It was race that bloodily tore the country apart a century and a half ago in the civil war, killing nearly 2% of the population (only 0.3% of Americans died in the second world war). It was race that convulsed America in the last deep internal crisis in the 1960s. And last Tuesday night, Obama’s first words were a tribute to his grandmother, a white woman who had effectively raised him.
Obama is not just potentially America’s first black president. He would be America’s first bi-racial president, in many ways a more integrative event. The cynics demand that we cease this kind of historical hyper-ventilation. It is deemed a function of drinking the Obama Kool-Aid, of insufficient scepticism, of Obamania.
But you have to have a heart of stone not to see what this has already done to race relations in America.
A black woman in Illinois sent me this e-mail on the night of Obama’s final victory: “Tomorrow I will go to the African-American cemetery outside of Chicago where my great-grandparents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends, neighbours and my mother and father are buried. And I will tell them that they were right - that if we studied hard, worked hard, kept the faith, fought for justice, prayed, that this day would come.”
And it has; but it came after a long, tortuous and extremely unlikely struggle and as a confluence of utterly unpredictable factors. It is just a moment in what remains a fluid general election campaign. But Obama is not a fluke and is not doomed to failure. The odds make him the favourite to be the next president of the United States and to revolution-ise its politics in ways more drastic than any figure since Ronald Reagan.
OBAMA owes this opportunity first and foremost to George W Bush. Without Bush there would be no Obama. Without the disastrous mismanagement of Iraq abroad and hurricane Kat-rina at home, the logic for a transformational candidacy such as Obama’s would never have added up.
Without the shame of Abu Ghraib and Guan-tanamo Bay, of torture and abuse of executive power, of mounting debt and accelerating inequality, the movement for truly radical change would never have taken off the way it has. Without the uniquely divisive politics of Karl Rove, who turned cultural and religious polarisation into an art form and 51% of the vote into a mandate for even more polarisation, there would be no unrequited desire for a new kind of politics.
Obama’s next debt of gratitude goes to the Clintons. They should have defeated him easily and yet their complacency and incompetence did them in. People tend to forget just how overwhelming the consensus was last autumn that Hillary Clinton was the inevitable Democratic nominee.
There were many cogent reasons for this consensus. Politics requires state and big city machines and they had almost all of them on their side. Hillary’s name recognition was stratospheric, the warm nostalgia in her party for the era of her husband was intense, her fundraising networks unrivalled, her confidence preternatural. She had a national lead over Obama of 20 to 30 points right up until the Iowa caucuses and a solid lead over him among African-American voters all of last year. The front-loaded primary season, with huge states voting early, suggested an even easier ride. Last December she predicted that it would all be over by February 5.
Obama knew this, but as early as spring last year he crafted a strategy to play to his strengths rather than his obvious weaknesses. The primary issue at the time was the Iraq war. He had been against it, Clinton for it: a big opening. The country also clearly wanted real change and Obama bet that the Clintons – generationally, culturally and politically – could not represent it. So he branded himself as the antiwar change candidate and waited for Clinton to do the same. Staggeringly, she didn’t.
Guided by the very small mind of Mark Penn, her strategist, she decided to run as the established, experienced Washington insider. In the Bush-Clinton-Bush pendulum, she banked on yet another swing back to her dynasty. She couldn’t have been more out of touch.
Obama also knew that he had to find new sources of funding. With the help of some of Silicon Valley’s smartest minds, he set up the first Facebook model for web fundraising. It has become the most formidable money machine in American political history, raising well over $270m from more than 1.7m individual donors. To counter Clinton’s name recognition, he then relaunched his first memoir alongside a new book and used the bookselling circuit to raise his profile. Oprah helped. He was No 1 on The New York Times bestseller list for months.
He studied the primary and caucus schedule to figure out how to outmanoeuvre the complacent Clintons. He always knew it would be hard to beat them in the popular vote. Hillary had too much clout, too much fame, too many debts to call in, too many powerful backers in the states to beat in votes. So he focused on delegates.
With some brilliant young strategists, David Plouffe and Steve Hildebrand chief among them, he analysed with uncanny precision how hard work in often forgotten states such as Alaska, Nebraska, Idaho, Colorado and Hawaii could get him an edge. He saw the Democrats’ proportional representation system as his greatest ally. He planned for the long haul, guessing that Hillary was too institutionally strong to be knocked out suddenly in Iowa and New
Hampshire alone - and that she hadn’t organised diligently enough in small caucus states. His focus on these tiny details all but mathematically guaranteed victory. Plouffe’s primary spreadsheets were eerily prescient. Obama had a plan that he stuck to and succeeded with.
He benefited also from the Clintons’ massive errors. They had no real game-plan after February, their expected victory moment. Their dependence on the practitioners of old politics – designed to protect them from Republican attack rather than to chart a new direction for America - left them with no real message except their familiarity and experience in Washington. In other years it would have been enough. Obama’s core strength was that he saw that this year was different. MANY Republicans seem to be making exactly the same mistake that the Clintons did – and with less of an excuse. The Republicans have so far emphasised two weaknesses for Obama: his relative inexperience compared with John McCain and his alleged cultural elitism.
In a Gallup poll last week, by far the biggest reason McCain supporters gave for supporting him was experience. Obama’s supporters cite change. The age difference cannot help but underscore this contrast. It would be silly for McCain not to use his much longer and more substantive record as a campaign theme. The trouble is, this year the forces behind change are much stronger than usual. If the campaign is framed around these themes, Obama has the advantage just as he did against Clinton.
Cultural elitism and liberalism are the next strong card. The Clintons used it to great effect in the Appalachian states and among the Reagan Democrats who have long been critical swing voters in general elections. Obama’s remarks about “bitter” voters in rural America, his association with the Rev Jeremiah Wright, his faint contacts with former members of the Weather Underground: all these will be used mercilessly in the autumn campaign. But these bludgeons will not have the force that they had on immediate impact and they didn’t stop Obama’s momentum against Clinton.
Race will matter but in different ways than in the past. Clinton was able to leverage mild Latino discomfort with a black man (and her own long ties to Hispanic groups) to beat Obama among this crucial bloc in the primaries. She destroyed him in California and Puerto Rico. McCain, from Arizona, a border state, has long favoured immigration reform. He should theoretically replicate Clinton’s success with Latinos in November. Yet the latest Gallup poll finds Hispanics going for Obama over McCain by 62% to 29%.
McCain suffers a great deal from the poisoned Republican brand among Hispanics. Latinos have historically not shown up at the polls in numbers reflective of their share of the population, but they play a role in four of the six states that Bush carried by five points or fewer in 2004: New Mexico (where Hispanics make up 37% of voters); Florida (14%); Nevada (12%) and Colorado (12%). This mattered in the congressional races of 2006 when Democrats led Republicans among Hispanics by 21 points in party identification. Now they favour Democrats by a 36-point margin. The politics of immigration have deeply wounded the Republicans – and McCain cannot be immune to all of it.
Regionally, an Obama-McCain race also looks subtly different from the classic election maps of the past decade and a half. We are used to seeing Ohio and Florida as the critical swing states. They still matter a lot but the new electoral map means Obama can lose these states and still win the presidency. Through a mix of record black turnout and affluent whites leaning increasingly to the Democrats, some southern and western states long since ceded to the Republicans are back in play.
Obama has done extremely well in Virginia, where high black turnout and an increasingly affluent population have made the state much less solidly Republican. In Colorado the same applies. Georgia – a huge and usually heavily Republican state – could even be close. A former Georgian congressman, Bob Barr, is running as the libertarian candidate for president and draining some white support from McCain in that state. Blacks make up a quarter to a third of voters and the state is also younger than most. The same dynamic also puts North Carolina and Mississippi in play.
Few believe that Obama could win all or most of these states. But he could make them competitive and force McCain to divert resources from other battlegrounds.
Just increasing the black share of the vote from a quarter to a third could tip the balance in some states. A strong showing by Obama in Virginia and Maryland, as well as Minnesota and the Mountain West, could give him an electoral college win. In states that Bush won by five points or less in 2004, Obama now has a narrow 47%-44% lead over McCain.
The vice-presidential choice will probably not make a huge difference; it rarely does. An Obama-Clinton ticket has been undone by her narcissism and gracelessness. The Clintons turn everything into their own psychodrama. The Obama camp gives every indication of picking a running mate who will not take the spotlight off the Obama-McCain contrast. It makes sense, though, to pick a Clintonite vice-presidential candidate, such as Ted Strickland, the governor of Ohio, to help to unite the party. IS an Obama presidency a done deal? Far from it. McCain is a formidable opponent and has real strength with critical independent voters. If any candidate can buck the national trend against the Republicans, he can.
On national security, his embrace of the surge in Iraq has shown itself to be more tactically prescient than Obama’s opposition. And he has done as much as he can to follow the David Cameron model: visiting depressed areas of the country, rebranding himself as green, promising to try to reduce America’s troop levels in Iraq by half in his first term. He will benefit from Obama’s newness, his liberal associations and the usual conservative fears of big-spending liberals.
His trouble is that hefty majorities seem set in their view that the Iraq war was a mistake, however pragmatic Americans now are about withdrawal. The latest poll shows that pragmatism has limits: 63% want all troops out in two years; only one in five takes the McCain position of keeping them there as long as it takes (and retaining the option to have bases there for the next century).
It is also hard for a Republican to campaign against runaway government spending when his own party has increased spending at a faster clip than at any time since the 1930s. And the cultural issues used by Bush and Rove are not natural fits for McCain. He’s not at home among the leaders of the religious right and would prefer to hang out, if push comes to shove, in Hollywood. He can promise conservative judicial appointments, and that matters to the base, but he has a hard time finding the oomph from, say, gay marriage that was required to secure a Bush victory in 2004.
The age contrast between Obama and McCain makes it hard to portray McCain as the change agent and Obama as the receptacle of old ideas. Some of Obama’s inclinations do seem a throwback; on taxation he favours increases in marginal rates and capital gains taxes. But his marshalling of the next generation and technological innovation swamp such a message.
Obama’s astonishing fundraising machine has also rattled the Republicans. He has raised $272m, primarily in small donations, from more than 1.7m individuals online. Clinton raised $200m. Combine their databases and the Democratic war chest is larger than any before in American history. McCain, even combined with the Republican party apparatus, cannot compete. He raised a seventh of Obama’s numbers in the primaries and his fundraising has not surged since he won the nomination.
To worry Republicans further, Obama has begun work on a voter registration drive across the country, targeting the young, Hispanics and African-Americans in particular. The underthirties tend not to show up at the polls in numbers large enough to make a real difference, but this year could prove that wrong - as it has in the primaries.
The impact of the first black presidential candidate on African-American turnout is simply impossible to predict. People tend to forget just how many black voters there are in the South, for example. They could surprise us. All they have to do is tip one usually Republican southern state to Obama and McCain’s base cracks open.
There are close to 3m African-Americans in Georgia and Florida, and 1.5m in Virginia. Blacks make up a third of the population in Mississippi. Most of these states have enough white Republicans to keep them in McCain’s column, but a surge in black turnout of historic proportions could produce suprise results in Florida or Georgia.
When you look at McCain’s campaign and ask yourself where he could bring out new voters in the same way, you come up empty. Bush won in 2004 by marshalling evangelical voters. McCain cannot do the same thing. Without them even John Kerry would have won easily. Security mums? It’s possible, but McCain does not have that strong an appeal to women. Veter-ans? They may well help McCain in a state such as Virginia or Ohio.
Perhaps McCain’s most promising advantage will come from independent and moderate voters intent on balancing what looks like a Democratic sweep in the House and Senate. He could appeal to them by portraying himself as a conservative balance to a liberal Congress. The trouble is that tactical voting has limited traction in a year where change and a desire to throw the bums out dominate the atmosphere.
Then there is the unknowable factor of Obama’s star power. No presidential candidate in modern times has drawn 75,000 people out for a primary election rally, as he did in Portland last month. No one has inspired the dozens of songs, anthems, YouTube videos and poster art that this figure has.
Obama has something that Reagan and John F Kennedy had: a charisma that seems to fit the presidency. And he is obviously more Kennedy than Reagan, with youth on his side. Give the American presidency the allure of youth and testos-terone and it is an intoxicating mass media phenomenon. His personality could do for it what Kennedy did, what John Paul II did for the institution of the papacy in his first years and what Diana did for the institution of the monarchy: it’s a fusion of op-cultural mass appeal with highly authoritative institutions.
The theatre of this is unmissable. What was previously a theory - a fantasy of a redeemed, rebranded America – gains real traction now that Obama is the actual nominee. As the moment approaches when he could be president, that power will only intensify.
It will require careful management if it is not to degenerate into cultism and messianism. But what Obama has is what Kennedy had and Diana famously didn’t: a cool and measured interior. What makes the phenomenon sustainable is this odd mix of hot and cool, of intense emotional energy around this man, centred on a very calm and collected, even aloof, individual. THIS has been an emotionally cathartic and draining primary season and yet through much of it, as Clinton went up and down on an emotional rollercoaster, as the media swooned and gasped and groaned, as pundits offered every conceivable gambit and interpretation, Obama’s team kept steady, made few errors, took few massive risks and never succumbed to the kind of slash-and-burn politics they were running against.
Obama has the ability to rouse enormous emotion while seeming almost casual and meditative at its centre. The diplomatic skill with which he has been handling the delicate matter of the Clinton ego is a wonder to behold.
Now imagine his first trip to Kenya. Or his first visit with his wife, Michelle, to Paris. (The French will swoon.) Or – for domestic audiences – his first trip to Iraq as the likely next president.
These moments will all become iconic and these images matter in shaping world opinion and world imagination. Abroad, his race is a massive advantage. That he is the most accomplished orator since Reagan makes it exponentially more powerful.
This is no panacea, of course. The tensions inherent in a hegemonic world power dealing with its allies and the developing world will not evaporate. Last week, as Obama gave a strong speech to the Israel lobby in Washington, Hamas declared him no better than Bush.
But he is not interested in talking to Hamas, primarily because he wants to negotiate the unnegotiable. The point of being open to direct negotiations is part of an attempt to show the world that America is no longer in a defensive crouch and prepared to cede the global public relations war to buffoons such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran.
Obama’s openness to the world is an attempt to reboot American soft power, to appeal beyond the leaders of rogue states to the young and restive populations in Iran and Paki-stan, to increase leverage if and when negotiating a responsible withdrawal from Iraq demands it.
This bottom-up approach to politics – rallying the forces below in order to help to shift the balance of power at the surface - is central to Obama’s community organising approach to politics. It is how he will ameliorate, but not transform, the still difficult tasks of security and diplomacy in a world still at risk from Islamist terror.
The world will also inevitably note in the person of a President Obama a moment in America’s own history. It will doubtless be surprised to see America confront its racial past so publicly. To watch a country you respect regain its bearings, to address one of its own deepest wounds in full view of the world, to do so after such a tumultuous, open and deeply American democratic process: this has already reminded many people around the world of what they love about America and what they have missed these past few years.
An American in London e-mailed me last week to report what one Brit had told her: “America didn’t become the nation it did with guns and tanks; it became the nation it did with ideas. An Obama presidency represents everything that America has told the world about itself in the past century – and what the rest of the world wanted to expect out of America. The idea that you talk before acting, the idea that you make friends, not enemies, and the idea that anything is possible.”
This last thought is the core meaning of Obama’s candidacy. That this meaning cannot be fleshed out in full policy detail without losing something is revealing. It’s an inherently ineffable and unreasonable notion that America does represent something new and hopeful for every generation, that it somehow encapsulates an idealism ill at ease in a more chastened old world.
This elusive quality made us remember Kennedy, even though he served (rashly) for only three years. It made us remember Reagan, another aloof figure like Obama liable to arouse mass enthusiasm. It has already given the Obama campaign an aura unlike any since 1980. It can be marshalled responsibly and irresponsibly; the trouble is that it is impossible to know for sure in advance whether it will end in disappointment or renewal.
But if I were forced to give a gut check on whether the initial promise can reach the White House in the next five months, I would be obliged to paraphrase the slogan that drove the past six months of campaigning. There are legitimate fears, serious anxieties, important doubts. But after watching him closely for the past year, one cannot but be drawn to an obvious conclusion: Yes he can.
timesonline.co.uk |
