Hero Abroad,Liability at Home:Obama fears the Blair effect
Sarah Baxter, The Sunday Times, July 20 2008
The Democrat contender will win fans on his European tour, but voters are likely to demand something more than photo ops
As Obama embarks on his first foreign tour as the Democratic presidential nominee, if Britain and Europe could vote, he would win the White House in a landslide.
A poll in The Guardian last week showed that Obama would trounce John McCain, his Republican rival, in Britain by a margin of five votes to one. France and Germany are even more ardent members of Obamaland.
Obama has been called the “black Kennedy” by a Berlin newspaper. Der Spiegel has run a cover feature on “The Messiah factor . . . and the yearning for a new America”. Le Monde has proclaimed, “Obamamania has spread to France”. Timothy Garton Ash, professor of European studies at Oxford, has compared the phenomenon with Dianamania.
In America, however, Obama is struggling to convince voters that he is The Chosen One. While he is supported abroad by almost everybody from French communists to German greens and plenty of British conservatives, his victory at home is far from assured.
As Angelina Jolie, the Hollywood star and goodwill ambassador for the United Nations, said recently: “I think people assume I’m a Democrat. But I’m a registered independent and I’m still undecided. So I’m looking at McCain as well as Obama.” Could Americans have cold feet about their history-making candidate?
Lee Hamilton, a senior Obama adviser and co-chairman of the influential Iraq Study Group, said frankly: “Many people in Europe look upon Senator Obama as the president-elect, but that’s not correct. It is going to be a very close election.”
Obama’s visit to Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, France, Germany and Britain will have plenty of photo-ops and Hello! magazine moments. The Illinois senator will be meeting Carla Bruni, the chanteuse and first lady of France, and is travelling with America’s most highly paid, celebrity television news anchors.
With the world as his stage, Obama, 46, hopes to persuade Americans that he is ready to become commander-in-chief. His minders are determined there will be no pictures of him in a flak-jacket or tank looking wimpish — the cause of Michael Dukakis’s downfall in the 1988 White House race.
A poll in The Washington Post last week showed that 72% of Americans thought McCain, a Vietnam war hero, would make a good commander-in-chief; only 48% felt the same way about Obama.
“He has to persuade voters to feel comfortable with him as president and he has not yet cleared that hurdle,” said Hamilton. “He is a relatively new figure, a young man and an African-American.
“There isn’t any single button he can push to achieve that comfort level and that is why this trip is so important. It will show that he can play in the major leagues.”
Yet the global coming of the Obamessiah is manna for critics who claim the Illinois senator has embarked on a humourless cult of personality. Exhibit A last week was his po-faced reaction to a satirical cartoon on the cover of The New Yorker showing Obama as a turban-wearing Muslim and his wife Michelle with a black-power Afro, wearing military fatigues.
It was “an insult against Muslim Americans”, he claimed, tweaking a nerve aroused by the riots over a Danish newspaper’s cartoons of the prophet Muhammad.
Although Obama has continued to raise money at a breathtaking pace, hauling in $52m in June, he leads McCain by only 46% to 42%, according to RealClearPolitics’ poll of polls, at a time when approval ratings for President George W Bush and the Republicans are in the mire.
Lanny Davis, a prominent supporter of Hillary Clinton during the primary campaign, said: “Why is he basically in a dead heat? If you are a Democrat ahead of a Republican by five or six points; and if you are polling under 50% and that stays the same through October, the Republican wins.”
Democrats are torn between the conviction that 2008 is their year and a rising sense of terror that they could blow yet another election.
The ever-ambitious Clinton has already sensed an opening. It emerged last week that she is sending hand-written letters to campaign donors asking them to roll over their contributions to her Senate re-election fund – with “any amount in excess” of the maximum $2,300 contribution going to the 2012 presidential election.
Lest there be any illusions about the desired target audience for Obama’s trip, the foreign media, including the BBC, have been left on the Tarmac. Only American reporters are on board “Obama One” as his plane heads from one country to the next.
He will have a 45-minute meeting on Saturday morning with Gordon Brown followed by a press conference, which Obama will conduct on his own outside Downing Street in a blatant departure from the usual protocol.
There will be no Brown at his side to spoil the No 10 backdrop for American voters, even though it would be unthinkable for a British prime minister to appear in the White House Rose Garden without the president.
Brown will say a few words later in the day, once Obama has gone.
David Cameron, the Conservative party leader, will also be granted an audience with the candidate.
On Thursday, Obama is expected to address vast crowds in front of Berlin’s golden-winged Statue of Victory after his request to speak in front of the Brandenburg Gate, where John F Kennedy declared, “Ich bin ein Berliner”, was rejected. However, the gate, which once marked the Cold War boundary between East and West Berlin, will still be visible in the distance.
McCain could only dream of such publicity and crowds when he visited Iraq, Jordan, Israel, France and Britain on a similar tour in March after winning his party’s presidential nomination.
Michael O’Hanlon, an expert on Iraq at the Brookings Institution, said Obama must beware of a “Tony Blair effect” by appearing more beloved abroad than at home. The more popular Blair was in America during the Iraq war, the more ferociously criticised he was in Britain.
“If Obama becomes the world’s poodle in the eyes of some voters and in Republican attack ads, that’s a downside.
“He mustn’t appear as the world’s psychotherapist, listening to their complaints about Uncle Sam,” O’Hanlon said. “But he is smart enough to avoid that.”
Europe can expect to receive some “tough love” from Obama in return for its adulation. Just as the Reverend Jesse Jackson, the civil rights leader, complained in embarrassing leaked comments that, “Barack, he’s talking down to black people . . . telling n*****s how to behave,” after Obama urged a predominantly black audience to take more parental responsibility, so Europe is in for a bit of a lecture about its contribution to global security.
Obama has already called for Nato to send more troops to Afghanistan and ease the restrictions on their military use. Susan Rice, his top foreign policy adviser, warned on the eve of the trip that there could no more “free riders” taking advantage of Bush’s unpopularity to leave the heavy lifting to America.
“Younger Germans especially find Obama fascinating as he represents a big change,” said Corinna Horst from the German Marshall fund. “But people should be careful what they wish for. As a Democratic candidate, he is likely to expect much more engagement from Europe on international missions such as Iraq and Afghanistan.”
As a quid pro quo, Obama is also offering to commit more American troops to fight the Taliban. “He will challenge other countries to do more, but he’ll do it in the context of a partnership,” said Hamilton. “We also have to make a larger contribution.” Hamilton, who co-chaired the bipartisan Iraq Study Group with James Baker, the Republican elder statesman, only to see its proposals cast aside by Bush in favour of the US troop surge, believes Obama will be able to create a national consensus on Iraq.
“We emphasised the idea of a responsible exit from Iraq and he approves of that. We emphasised the importance of diplomatic initiatives in the region, including talking to Iran, and he approves of that,” Hamilton said. “He is in sync with our major recommendations.”
Although Obama has been heavily criticised for sticking to a 16-month timetable for troop withdrawals, on Friday the White House moved towards his position by agreeing to negotiate a “general time horizon” — a euphemism for a timetable — for American troop reductions, with Nouri al-Maliki, the increasingly assertive Iraqi prime minister.
At the same time, Obama has been finessing his own policy. “He has a very clear sense of direction on Iraq, which is ‘out’,” said Hamilton, “but he is not going to withdraw troops precipitously. He has also said he will make ‘tactical adjustments’ and they would surely include the timetable for withdrawal.”
In Iraq he is expected to listen attentively to General David Petraeus, the Middle East commander, about the pace of reductions. “Obama has decided views — you would not expect otherwise from a politician of his maturity — but he genuinely does listen and understands what he hears,” Hamilton said.
Defence sources in Washington suggested that McCain and Obama will ultimately arrive at a similar position on Iraq, despite coming from different directions.
One defence official predicted that McCain and Obama would both end up with about 60,000 troops in Iraq — “easily enough to cope” if conditions on the ground continue to improve.
Once Obama arrives home, he should stop focusing on foreign affairs, seasoned advisers warn. In 1992, one of the few occasions when a Democrat was elected president in the past 40 years, Bill Clinton’s slogan was: “It’s the economy, stupid.”
The world may love Obama, but Americans love a president who focuses like a laser on their greatest concerns. |
