At 109m, Amanda Jones is too frail to go to the polls on Tuesday, so she voted
early by post last week. Her father was born a slave in Texas and herded
sheep until he was freed at the age of 12. She cast her ballot for Barack
Obama. “I feel good about voting for him,” Jones said.
Her family helped her to obtain an absentee ballot. “It’s awesome to me that
we have such a pillar of our family still with us,” said Brenda Baker, her
44-year-old granddaughter. “It’s awesome to see what she’s done, and all her
hard work, and to see that she may be able to see the results of that hard
work.”
Jones’s life provides an arc between America’s past and its future. If Obama
is elected in two days’ time, he will make history as its first black
president. His campaign has been decidedly modern in its scope and ambition,
pioneering the use of the internet to drum up support, encouraging young
people and African-Americans to vote in record numbers and raising a
staggering $700m.
Along the way, Obama has reached into the past for inspiration from another
Illinois politician – President Abraham Lincoln, who freed Jones’s father in
the 1860s.
“If Obama wins it will be an important moment in the evolution of the
country,” said Artur Davis, a black congressman from Alabama who has known
the Democrat since Harvard Law School.
Davis said Obama, 47, was a uniquely gifted figure. “Some presidents become
icons after they get elected, like John F Kennedy. Barack Obama has managed
to become a cultural icon in the course of the campaign, and we’ve never
seen that before.”
Is it hype, hope, or a realistic assessment of Obama as he enters the final
stretch of the long-running White House race? Is he The One or “that one”,
as John McCain, his embattled Republican opponent, has called him?
For several weeks, the polls have shown Obama hovering consistently around the
50% winning mark. He currently enjoys a six-point average lead against
McCain. The Illinois senator, who was unknown outside his home town of
Chicago only four years ago, has been on a roll since the economic crisis
hit the nation with startling force just over a month ago.
A transition team, led by John Podesta, Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff,
is already poring over potential Obama appointments.
McCain, 72, a former Vietnam prisoner of war, has his own team in place, but
it lacks the same energy and sense of purpose. It is a reflection of the
character of the two candidates – the one a cool, level-headed planner, the
other a fighter and improviser – as much as their standing in the polls.
If he wins, Obama intends to hit the ground running. He is expected to appoint
a chief of staff and senior White House aides within 24-48 hours and to move
rapidly to fill the top three cabinet positions at the Treasury, Pentagon
and Department of State. With the economy in a tailspin and two wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq, there is no time to dawdle, especially as Senate
confirmation hearings can drag on indefinitely.
“He is committed to getting people in place quickly so that he’s ready to
govern when he takes office in January,” an Obama adviser said. The history
of President Franklin D Roosevelt’s first 100 days in office has become
essential reading.
To kick off, there is likely to be an open forum on the economy, with big-name
figures such as Warren Buffett, the billionaire financial investor, and Paul
Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, airing their views on
how to dig America out of recession, salvage the housing market and embark
on a green energy revolution.
After encouraging an unprecedented degree of voter participation in his
campaign, Obama is determined to include the public in his deliberations.
Republicans and business leaders will also be invited. “If he wants to be
postpartisan, it’s a tremendous opportunity to get the other side of the
table with him in an environment that is not overly political,” said Tad
Devine, a leading Democratic strategist.
Obama is also expected to call in the joint chiefs of staff to explore the
prospects of an orderly withdrawal from Iraq, strengthen America’s military
presence in Afghanistan and assess the threat of a nuclear Iran.
Greg Craig, a senior foreign policy adviser, believes Obama will be a deft but
tough leader. “Does he have the capacity to pull the trigger? Yes he does,”
he said. “His adversaries have tried to portray him as weak and unwilling to
deploy American troops, but he has a spine of steel.”
The McCain campaign is doing its best to ridicule Obama’s presumption. The
presidential heir apparent has not won the election yet. “Americans don’t
like you to measure the drapes,” McCain said last week. “They want you to
win first. And that’s why we have a period of time between the election and
the inauguration.”
However, a look at the key battleground states shows that former Republican
strongholds such as Virginia, Colorado and perhaps even North Carolina and
Indiana, the last two of which George W Bush won by double digits in 2004,
are poised to fall to the Democrats.
The electoral and demographic map of America is shifting in ways that will be
fully understood only as the votes are counted – and the world is helping to
give it a shove. British supporters have been flocking to join Obama’s
volunteers. Tony Underwood, a history student at Nottingham University, has
been campaigning for Obama in Pennsylvania.
“Barack Obama is an inspirational figure. What happens here will cross the
Atlantic,” he predicted. “Everybody who volunteers feels that they are part
of something great, that this is their campaign. People believe they can
influence politics.”
An all-out war is being waged on the ground and on the airwaves in Florida,
the scene of Bush’s disputed squeaker of a win in 2000 and five-point
victory four years later. If Obama can wrest the state from the Republicans,
he will be on his way to the White House.
When Bill Clinton appeared at a late-night rally for Obama near Disney World
in Orlando last week, he looked around the strikingly multiracial crowd of
35,000 and joked, “You’ve even got a few grey-headed white guys like me; you
haven’t shut out my demographic yet.”
White, older Americans may yet roar their support for McCain on election day.
But the country is changing in ways that the Republican party has not fully
grasped. In the crowd was Cheryl Maxham, 57, a white airline worker who had
backed Hillary Clinton in the primary campaign.
She was just the sort of voter the McCain camp hoped to win over, but she was
now an enthusiastic Obama supporter.
Maxham’s daughter is married to a black man. “I have two black grandchildren.
They’re adorable,” she said. “I don’t like my son-in-law. I never have. But
it’s not because of his colour. Nobody’s good enough for my daughter, that’s
all. There are a lot of white men I don’t like.”
She is mindful that racial tension still exists in America. “I’m proud to tell
you that I am voting for Obama, but I wouldn’t put a bumper sticker on my
car,” Maxham said. “I’d be afraid someone would vandalise it.”
Before the rally, a friend told her of the rumour spreading like wildfire.
“‘Watch out when you get there because all the ammo in town has been bought
up.’ She was sort of joking, but who knows?” she said. Nevertheless, she is
convinced that prejudice is waning. “This is 2008. Get a life!” she
exclaimed.
Black Americans were initially reluctant to support Obama, fearful that he
would be assassinated like those champions of civil rights, Lincoln, Kennedy
and Martin Luther King. Two skinheads were charged last week with a bizarre
plot to behead blacks and assassinate Obama while wearing white tuxedos and
top hats.
Today, African-Americans are mainly worried that after a long history of
discrimination their votes somehow will not count. It explains the long,
orderly queues at early voting stations among an electorate that is hungry
for change.
In Orlando, Hazel and Arnold Hinds, a retired black couple in their seventies,
waited for over an hour to vote for Obama last week. They wanted to be sure
their choice was recorded after the fiasco of the “hanging chads” when
Vice-President Al Gore ran for president in 2000.
“I hope to God Obama wins,” Hazel Hinds said. “I tell you, this is Florida. In
Florida, there’s always something.” Gore went back to Florida to campaign
for Obama for the first time last week. The Nobel prize-winner said
ruefully, “Take it from me, elections matter. Every vote matters.”
Obama is leaving nothing to chance. He is returning to the state on an
11th-hour swing through the battlegrounds tomorrow. The greatest obstacle to
his election was complacency, he warned. “Don’t believe for a second this
election is over. Don’t think for a minute that power concedes anything.
It’s gonna get nasty, I’m sure,” he said.
Yesterday Zeituni Onyango, 56, Obama’s aunt from Kenya, who lives in public
housing in Boston, experienced this at first hand after news leaked that she
was in the country illegally. “Aunt Zeituni”, as Obama referred to her in
his memoir, was ordered to leave the US four years ago after her asylum
request was denied.
McCain and the Republicans saved every last penny to splash out on a final
advertising blitz in Florida that is matching or even outspending Obama on
the air. It may have come too late. A third of the electorate in Florida has
already voted. In other swing states, such as North Carolina and Nevada,
roughly 40% of voters have already cast their ballots.
The Obama campaign has identified a new species among this voting block – the
“sporadic voter”, who generally doesn’t bother to turn out for elections but
appears to be making an exception for this one.
By the time the Hinds went to the polls last Thursday, the tallies were
striking. In their county, which Bush won by five points in 2004, nearly
90,000 people had voted – 10,000 more than the total early vote at the last
election. Of these, 50,000 were registered Democrats and only 20,000 were
Republicans. The remaining 17,000 were independents.
In a repeat of the primary campaign against Hillary Clinton, Obama has
reassembled his winning coalition of the wine-drinking, educated white
middle-class, the under35s and African-Americans and topped it up with the
support of 70% of Hispanics, who were slow to warm to him. In addition, the
polls show Obama enjoying a double-digit lead among women now that the
popularity of Sarah Palin, McCain’s Alaskan running mate, has fizzled.
That leaves McCain with the support of white, male, beer-drinking “Joe the
Plumber” and friends – and there probably aren’t enough of them to go around.
Betsy Myers, a senior Obama adviser since the campaign’s inception, noted long
ago that Obama had remarkable leadership skills for a political newcomer.
“We were a $100m start-up enterprise. We didn’t even have a bank account,”
she recalled. “Could we run a campaign?”
The answer, it seemed, was, “Yes we can.”
On the satirical television show Saturday Night Live a few days ago, actor
Will Ferrell impersonated Bush goofily calling Obama the “Tiger Woods guy”.
The comparison was apt. It was crucial for Obama to exude the same
nonthreatening, postracial appeal as the golfer – hence the repeated
last-ditch attempts by the McCain campaign and conservative attack groups to
portray him as a quasi-Muslim and radical.
Shelby Steele, a conservative African-American academic at the Hoover
Institute at Stanford University, published an influential book last year, A
Bound Man, suggesting that Obama’s mask as a “bargainer” with white society
meant that he could go far in politics, but it would not be enough to take
him to the White House.
He has changed his mind. “The economy did it. It looks pretty certain Barack
Obama will be the next president; but, like most people, I’m not sure what
kind of president he is going to be,” Steele said. “He will always be a
bargainer, a person who relieves the anxieties of white people about race.”
Steele believes the impact of an Obama victory has been overestimated.
“You’ll have the first African-American president, but so what? It may have
a small, tiny effect, but it’s not going to mean much.
“The problems of African-Americans are deep and profound and go back
centuries. I hope we can learn a lesson as blacks that it is not about role
models, it’s about how you live your life.” Artur Davis takes a different
view. “Some people think Obama is an [exception] because of the uniqueness
of his personality, but I don’t believe it. Once the door is opened to the
future, all kinds of things begin to happen.”
Americans are peering through that door now. Will they take a step into the
unknown? If the early voting provides a guide, perhaps they already have.
Additional reporting: Imogen Morizet
