The eagerly anticipated text message arrived on millions of mobile phones
yesterday at 3am. With it, many Americans who had registered to be updated
with details of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign will have been woken to
the news that Joe Biden, the Delaware senator, will be his running mate on
the Democratic party’s ticket.
Many of them will have got the joke. In the brutal primaries, Hillary
Clinton’s most effective ad showed a phone ringing at 3 am - and asked who
Americans would trust to answer it in the Oval Office. In picking Biden at
3am, Obama was telling the world that he had chosen a No 2 able to take over
in a crisis.
The announcement was merely the latest dramatic act in what has already been a
draining, historic, exhilarating nine months of frantic campaigning. Yet the
most important thing dawning on observers of the election, even those who
have been examining it under a microscope for months, is that the real
campaign starts now - and no one has a clue what is going to happen.
Stop analysing the polls of the past month indicating a surge by John McCain,
the Republican nominee. If you looked at the polls at this point in the last
two election cycles, you would see they were poised for real movement only
now. This, after all, is when the mass of American voters tune in.
Already there are signs that the intensity of the campaigning has increased
over the summer. Obama made his first move against McCain six weeks ago with
his trip to the Middle East and Europe. It cemented his commander-in-chief
potential, especially as the Iraqi government used the opportunity to
endorse a US timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, Obama’s long-held position.
Obama’s hugely successful speech in Berlin, however, gave the McCain camp an
opening for a barrage of negative adverts featuring Paris Hilton, among
others, that lampooned Obama as an empty celebrity.
Then came lucky pay dirt: while Obama was on holiday, Russia invaded Georgia
and McCain hogged the airwaves, reacting as if he were a hyperactive but
knowledgeable president. His numbers jumped.
But the wheel turned again as he made a hilarious gaffe last week. When asked
how many homes he owned, McCain stammered that he could not remember. The
Democrats had a field day - it turns out that he has at least seven - and
Obama showed the glint of steel that makes him a more lethal candidate than
John Kerry, who stood against George W Bush four years ago.
Television adverts cascaded on top of YouTube videos, mocking McCain for being
that rich and property-careless in an economy where hundreds of thousands of
Americans are faced with the loss of their homes. Obama, meanwhile, kept the
country on tenter-hooks by withholding until the last minute his choice of
Biden as his running mate.
The campaigning has been more intense, and dirtier, than at this point in
previous elections. And the sense of drama will only increase.
How do you predict the reaction to Thursday night when the first black nominee
for president from a leading party gives his acceptance speech in front of
nearly 75,000 people in a Den-ver sports stadium, 45 years to the day since
Martin Luther King’s historic “I have a dream” speech? Does the pugnacious
McCain, the former Vietnam prisoner of war, have a plan to counteract the
spectacle?
This is not like most British elections, where party loyalties and messages
have been honed for years and their leaders are well established. McCain has
led the Republicans for just three months (and was the equivalent of a
cranky back-bencher and failed leadership challenger before that). Obama has
been the Democratic leader for a mere two months and was elected to the
Senate only four years ago.
This is about two very different men and the American people’s relationship
with each. The final run-off, especially after the gruelling primaries, has
yet to take shape in people’s minds and the contrast between the candidates
is still fresh. Now is when it gets really interesting.
WHEN you take a good, long, as-fresh-as-you-can look at the two men on stage,
it is not that huge a mystery why the race has been within a few percentage
points since Obama finally wrested the nomination from the Clinton dynasty.
McCain and Obama are two evenly matched, larger-than-life figures with
riveting biographies, charisma and a capacity to appeal beyond the members
of their own parties. Of course the public is evenly divided about them.
In this face-off - between perhaps the most talented duo to joust for the
title since Kennedy and Nixon in 1960 - America sees parts of itself, past
and future, and finds it understandably difficult to make a choice just yet.
Obama’s advantages are no secret. After a long period of Republican-dominated
governance, the public is ready for change. Few dispute that his party will
expand its majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate
(in that sense, a large part of this election has already been decided –
America is headed left). The economy is stuttering. Large numbers of
homeowners have seen the value of their properties slide, while the price of
petrol and food has soared. In this climate the incumbent president’s party
tends to suffer.
The degree to which Obama breaks the mould of candidates is hard to overstate,
however. No black man has ever made it this far in American history, or even
close. In the year Obama was born, his parents’ interracial marriage would
have been illegal in many states. Obama comes from Hawaii, whence no
previous president has hailed. He is a first-term senator whose entire
candidacy rests on opposition to a war that has recently gone from worse to
bad. He has the funniest name of any presidential candidate in history. And
yet he can bring 200,000 Germans onto the streets of Berlin before he has
even become president - and he was able to take on and outwit the biggest
machine in American party politics, the Clintons.
Whatever else he is, he is not a familiar trope. It is no surprise that
Americans have taken their time to get his measure - and many still have not.
Obama’s Americanness, however, is deep, for all the aspersions of otherness
thrown at him. His DNA combines two of the more indelible American
identities: heartland grit and immigrant dreams. Half his family has roots
in Kansas, the heart of the heartland. His largely absent father came from a
distant place, Kenya, and Obama grew up in, among other places, Indonesia.
These two identities place him at the centre of a churning, yet
traditionally immigrant country.
His eclectic Americanness reveals itself elsewhere as well.
He is at home in the rabble-rousing church of his former pastor Jeremiah
Wright and yet he is also in his element at the University of Chicago and
Harvard Law School. He plays basketball and can write like a professional
novelist. He is a product of modern Chicago and premodern Indonesia - and
able to note similarities in each.
It is hard to think of a man with this story existing in any other country,
let alone being in a position, in his mid-forties, to become the president
of it. In the context of America, though, the strangeness of Obama is not so
strange. It is imbued with the possibility of self-reinvention. Nothing is
more American than that. THE raw appeal of McCain as a candidate, on the
other hand, is rooted in another form of Americanness. It is an older form
but just as potent. McCain draws on the Scots-Irish belligerence and sense
of honour that have fuelled America for centuries. A military man through
and through, his uniformed pedigree goes back generations to the war of
independence. McCain represents tradition in this sense, a man whose
instinctive solidarity with Britain, for example, is second nature to him.
Psychologically, he is both a passionate servant of what he regards as
national honour - and yet he is also an indefatigable rebel. He has rarely
met an institution that he does not want to both uphold and to undercut. He
broke every rule in the Naval Academy and yet it would be hard to express
the love the man obviously has for the US armed services. He is a revered
senator and shrewd legislator, but almost all his Senate colleagues have
been at the wrong end of a barrage of expletives at one time or other.
His Vietnam war career was undistinguished. He was involved in a dreadful
accident on an aircraft carrier and then got shot down early in combat. But
when he was in the worst position imaginable - captured, tortured, held for
years in a hellish prison - his sense of duty never wavered.
His father, by that time, was the commander of all US forces in the Vietnam
theatre and McCain could have secured early release. The single,
unimpeachable act of heroism that set him apart from every other PoW was his
refusal to be freed ahead of his fellow soldiers. He was all-too-human in
every other way: cracking under torture, giving false confessions to serve
Vietnamese propaganda and attempting suicide because of the shame he felt
for submitting. But beneath his incompetence and insolence there was a
character and sense of duty worth not just taking seriously, but honouring.
McCain is a far more mercurial, emotional and volatile character than Obama.
Despite being a generation older - he will be 72 on Friday - he is
temperamentally much younger than his rival. There is a lot of Churchill in
McCain: the melodrama and the sanctimony, the mawkishness and the sincerity,
the big heart and sometimes faulty judgment.
In the days and weeks after 9/11, McCain was always on television, rallying
the nation, almost relishing the chance to prove his staying power as others
peeled away. When you hear him today talking of the great sacrifice of the
surge and the genius of General David Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq,
and the need to stay there indefinitely and to launch a surge in
Afghanistan, you see him where he wants to be: alone, prescient, courageous.
Now recall Obama’s response to 9/11. He supported the war in Afghanistan but
opposed the Iraq war. He opposed it on cerebral grounds and poured oil on
choppy waters. While McCain was already in the hyperventilating vanguard of
the neoconservative project (and I was right there with him), Obama was
delivering the following measured caveats: “I don’t oppose all wars . . .
What I am opposed to is a dumb war . . . I know that an invasion of Iraq
without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only
fan the flames of the Middle East and encourage the worst, rather than best,
impulses of the Arab world.”
Obama is politically liberal and temperamentally conservative; McCain is
temperamentally liberal and politically unpredictable. Obama is cerebral;
McCain is emotional. Obama is reserved, sometimes aloof; McCain is a social
gadfly and seemingly terrified of being left alone and silent. Obama wins
press adoration but is not close to journalists; McCain is personal friends
with hacks of all sorts. Obama makes plans and executes them with sometimes
chilling discipline; McCain veers from one passion to another, winging it -
and somehow pulling it off.
Obama hates to lose but is happy to hang back in a fight, allowing his
oppo-nent to overreach himself; McCain is just as competitive, but if he has
ever pulled a rhetorical or political punch, it’s news to me.
Obama is a master of the rhetorical set-piece; McCain is happiest yakking it
up at informal town hall meetings, telling corny jokes. Obama has a
traditional family life, a solid marriage, two seemingly poised young
daughters and, until recently, regularly attended church (something that
seems to elude Republican presidents, for all their public religiosity).
McCain dumped his first wife after she was disfigured in a car accident and
married a pretty heiress. He has children from both marriages and an adopted
child from a Bangladeshi orphanage.
Yes, Obama dabbled in drugs as a young man; but McCain was marinated in booze.
McCain, in other words, has a good deal of George W Bush’s adolescence in
him, without the born-again experience. Obama, for all his affect of cool,
is actually quite nerdy. IT IS possible, of course, to admire both men, to
like them in their very different ways and yet remain torn about which one
would be best to lead America, and the world, for the next four or eight
years. The difficult question Americans have to ask themselves is not who is
the right man – it is who is right for now. After 9/11, Afghanistan and
Iraq, as Russia reasserts itself, as Iran closes in on a nuclear bomb, as
Pakistan threatens to crack apart and as the US economy teeters on crisis,
which of these two men has the qualities needed to succeed?
If you believe the problem with America’s war on terror is that it has not
been ambitious enough, or tough enough, or monumental enough, McCain is your
man. If you think the United States needs to be feared more than it needs to
be loved, McCain is your man. And if you think that the economic policies of
the past eight years - specifically Bush’s low tax rates - are necessary for
growth, McCain is the obvious choice.
In some ways he is the last hope for the Republicans that their conservative
movement is rescuable. McCain reassures them that the Bush era was not a
total miscalculation but merely a good idea poorly executed.
Obama represents something more radical: a return of the multilateral,
international umbrella of traditional American diplomacy and
alliance-building. He represents this even as America is at war with deeply
destructive forces in the asymmetrical global battlefield and even as
partners such as Russia and China seem uninterested in keeping the
international system as a model of rational discourse. He is less likely to
see a struggle between good and evil in the world than a dark but promising
place where the American national interest and the elevation of human
dignity in the developing world are compatible.
At home he offers a return to Clinton-era economics, with tax rates hiked on
the wealthy and marginally cut for the middle class. Unlike McCain, who
likes the imperial presidency put on steroids by Bush and Dick Cheney, his
vice-presi-dent, Obama would root the presidency more firmly within
historical norms, deferring to Congress and the courts at times, determined
to restore what he believes is a more traditional relationship between the
executive branch and the rule of law.
Were it not for the surge’s minor rehabilitation of the Iraq war, it would be
hard to see how McCain would stand a chance. The glimmers of success in
Mesopotamia have fanned the dying embers of neo-conservatism - and Vladimir
Putin’s Cheney-like attitude to asserting Russia’s interests has made
McCain’s otherwise slightly retro 1980s combativeness seem less irrational.
For the moment McCain has leveraged understandable hesitation about Obama
among those who do not yet know him well and kept himself in the race. This
week Obama will be forced to redraw the narrative, redescribe this moment in
history and persuade Americans that he really is the one most suited to take
the country and the world forward.
He has his work cut out for him. And so does McCain. This is a Nadal-Federer,
Borg-McEnroe affair. I predict five sets. And a great match.
