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Central: what are your hopes for Obama? | The
Child returned - and final battle was joined
On a beautiful autumn day seven years ago, I stood below the burning towers of
the World Trade Center in New York and felt the world spin. The late 20th
century’s period of western peace and prosperity had drawn to an end and
this, it seemed, was to be its successor – an era of war and danger to
compare with the horrors of my parents’ generation.
As I made my way home, shocked and covered in ash and debris from the fallen
towers, I felt afraid for my children and the century they would inherit.
Eventually my optimism returned and in the freezing cold last January my
husband, Jez, and I took our children out of school to watch Senator Edward
Kennedy, the last of the Kennedy brothers, endorse Barack Obama for
president.
It wasn’t obvious yet that Obama would win the White House, but he was already
making history as the first African-Ameri-can who was in with a chance. He
had said all along it was an “improbable” journey for the son of a single
mother from Kansas and a Kenyan father, but with a true pioneer spirit he
had embarked on it anyway.
We wanted Billie, 11, and Max, 8, to see that America really was a land of
opportunity. The Kennedys were quasi-royal, but Obama was a modern
21st-century version of a candidate who was trying to make it from log cabin
to White House.
“I was too young to remember John Kennedy and I was just a child when Robert
Kennedy ran for president,” Obama said with the old liberal lion of the
Senate at his side. “But in the stories I heard growing up, I saw how my
grandparents and mother spoke about them and about that period in our
nation’s life as a time of great hope and achievement.”
Perhaps that is how our children will remember election day 2008. The politics
of hope has vaulted Obama, 47, from unknown Illinois senator to president
and commander-in-chief of the world’s super-power in a few short years.
In Grant Park in Chicago, where he gave his victory speech on a surprisingly
warm night last Tuesday, the crowd of 125,000 was on an emotional high.
Denise Thomas, 38, an African-American from Chicago, told me: “I feel like
I’m not here. I am floating on air. He’s a great visionary. He’s got his
work cut out, but he’s going to do it. I know it.”
President-elect Obama is about to inherit two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and
Osama Bin Laden is still at large. The economy is in even worse shape than
when it collapsed after 9/11. The threat of terrorism has not receded.
But America feels good about itself and its future again. Its moral standing
in the eyes of the world rose overnight. Feizel Mamdoo, my brother-in-law,
texted me from Johannesburg: “You’d think South Africa was voting! There are
allnight election parties here.”
Feizel and I haven’t always agreed about politics recently. He thought
President George George W Bush was a fool and a bully; I thought it was
worth trying to make America safer by bringing democracy to some of the
world’s most wretched tyrannies.
I believe that America is a remarkable force for good. Obama’s achievement is
that a world that has been blinkered by Bush Derangement Syndrome can again
see America for what it actually is.
THE nation that voted for its first black president last week was also present
on 9/11. It was there in the posters of the missing that were plastered all
over Manhattan and in the moving “portraits of grief” compiled by The New
York Times.
Far from being a bunch of plutocrats who had it coming to them, the 3,000
victims of the attacks formed a rainbow nation of their own: flight
attendant Betty Ong, insurance manager DaJuan Hodges, canteen worker Lukasz
Milewski, firefighter Sergio Villanueva, army major Dwayne Williams — the
list goes on. Some of them, like Milewski, a Pole, had only just arrived in
the country. They were all mourned as Americans.
I don’t know if they would have supported Obama, but the coalition he
assembled in his bid for the presidency looked very similar. Exit polls show
he won the support of 43% of white voters, two points more than John Kerry,
the 2004 Democratic candidate; 67% of Hispanics voted for him, with 31% of
them voting for John McCain; 66% of young people voted for Obama, 32% of
them for McCain. And 95% of African-Americans voted for him, turning out at
the polls in record numbers.
When McCain, 72, a war hero who ran an uncharacteristically small-minded
campaign, began to use “Joe the Plumber” as his last desperate campaign
prop, he revealed that he had misread the new America as comprehensively as
its foreign critics. White working-class males like bald-headed Joe have
lost their electoral and demographic supremacy.
Around the time that McCain was shot down and imprisoned in Vietnam in the
late 1960s, I was a child living in Montgomery, Alabama, where my father, an
RAF officer, was stationed at the height of the civil rights movement. It
was there that George Wallace, the notoriously racist Democratic governor,
had vowed to maintain “segregation for ever” and Rosa Parks had refused to
give up her seat for a white person on a bus. That America is over.
In his victory speech in Chicago, Obama told the story of Ann Nixon Cooper, a
106-year-old African-American Southerner who was born without voting rights
because of her race and gender. She had witnessed the birth of the motor
car, the Great Depression, world war and “was there for the buses of
Montgomery”. As he spoke, I felt myself touch “the arc of history” that he
referred to, even though as a young girl at an all-white school in
Montgomery I had done absolutely nothing for civil rights.
As a dual citizen of America and Britain — my mother is from Ohio — it was
impossible not to feel I had a small stake in Obama’s campaign. As a
reporter I have drawn attention to his successes and shortcomings. But I’ve
wanted the rest of the world to see America as I did ever since 9/11.
Many die-hard Republicans also paused last week to say that the election of
the first African-American president made them feel proud, before promising
to oppose Obama again tomorrow. Mark Salter, McCain’s long-serving chief
aide, reflected on media bias in an interview with the Politico website. “We
all felt the tug — I feel it to a certain extent — about civil rights
reconciliation and how, in backing Obama, we could all do our bit. Many
reporters felt it too,” he said.
I can’t claim to have foreseen Obama’s victory from the beginning, even though
he was a celebrity from the moment he spoke at the Democratic national
convention in 2004. He had the early magic, but the party machinery was in
the hands of one of America’s most formidable dynasties, the Clintons.
In January 2007 I went to interview Terry McAuliffe, the gregarious former
chairman of the Democratic National Committee and friend of Bill and Hillary
Clinton. He generously gave me a scoop — Hillary was going to declare she
was running for president that weekend and he would be her campaign
chairman. She was going to be America’s version of Margaret Thatcher, their
own Iron Lady.
“Their policies are totally different but they are both perceived as very
tough,” McAuliffe told me. “She is strong on foreign policy. People have got
to know you are going to keep them safe.”
I asked about Obama, but he shrugged off his challenge. “She has the name
recognition, the money, the glitz, she’s got it all,” McAuliffe said. He
hinted that it was a good idea for Democrats to clamber on Hillary’s train
before it left the station. It was all right for a few friends of Obama and
Democrats from his home town of Chicago to support him, but everyone else
was expected to fall in line.
That tactic worked for nearly a year. It was not just opportunism that gave
Hillary the edge. Many African-Americans, such as the revered congressman
John Lewis, who is still scarred by the police beating he received on the
civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, initially backed
Clinton. He felt enormous affection and loyalty for Hillary, who was a
proven friend of African-Americans.
The writer Maya Angelou, author of the remarkable memoir I Know Why the Caged
Bird Sings, a set text in many schools, told me she was sticking by Clinton
even as other African-Americans began to defect. I used to be Angelou’s
publicist in Britain, setting up appearances for her on The Terry Wogan Show
on television and a host of other programmes when I worked for Virago, the
feminist publisher, in the mid-1980s. Angelou had recited a poem at Bill
Clinton’s inauguration and felt close to Hillary. “I made up my mind 15
years ago that if she ever ran for office, I’d be on her wagon,” Angelou
said. “You’ve got to dance with the one who brung you.”
Despite these early disadvantages, Obama found a way to build a cash-rich
smooth-running campaign based on $5-$100 contributions from small donors. He
also had the support of glamorous Hollywood figures such as George Clooney
and Scarlett Johansson and the aid of a few stunningly effective political
operators, including the rumpled David Axelrod, his chief strategist, and
David Plouffe, his number-crunching campaign manager.
When I went canvassing with McAuliffe on a chilly, snowy day in Iowa just
after Christmas last year, he still sounded bullish about Clinton’s chances.
Obama, he thought, would make a great president — “but not yet”. But a note
of uncertainty crept in: he said that he had “cringed” when Clinton’s
nomination was presented as inevitable.
A few days later Clinton came third in the Iowa caucus, shattering the myth of
her inevitability. For me, the surprise was not that she lost but that Obama
suddenly acquired such a presidential aura. I had seen him plenty of times
already on the campaign trail, when he had been lagging in the polls and
seemed destined to lose. But when I saw Michelle, his wife, and Malia and
Sasha, his young daughters, on the stage at his side for his victory speech,
I recognised an astonishing tableau of the black first family-in-waiting of
America.
I turned to a congressman friend of Obama and asked: “Is Obama the new Bill
Clinton?”
“No,” he replied. “He is the new John F Kennedy.”
THAT, it turned out, was only the half of it. Obama did not just want to be
president; he wanted to be a transformational figure, the phrase that Colin
Powell, the former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and Republican
secretary of state, employed when endorsing him in the final stretch of the
presidential campaign.
In addition to the magic of Kennedy, Obama hoped to achieve the cross-party
appeal of President Ronald Reagan, who converted blue-collar Democrats into
long-lasting Republicans. On his campaign plane, Obama told me that he
intended to put bipartisan Republicans, such as the senators Richard Lugar
and Chuck Hagel, in his cabinet. We shall soon see if he does.
During those early primaries, Obama’s praise for Reagan as a more
consequential figure than Bill Clinton irritated the Clintons beyond belief
— and he had not buried them yet. Hillary won New Hampshire with the help of
a few tears, and the long trench warfare across the rest of America’s 50
states began.
The more she campaigned, the more she won the affection of middle Americaas a
fighter and a champion of their concerns. Obama was transformed into an
inexperienced, pointy-headed, rocket-salad-eating elitist.
My mother, 79, is a typical Ohioan and lifelong Democrat who backed Clinton in
the Democratic primary. Like many women she respected Hillary for her
attempt to expand healthcare when she was first lady in the 1990s, for
enduring years of insult from Republicans and for the dignity with which she
had borne the humiliating news of Bill’s infidelity. Along with 18m
Democrats who voted for Hillary, my mother also wanted to crack the glass
ceiling and elect a woman president.
Obama simply hadn’t done the time, as far as she was concerned. “I don’t know
who he is,” my mother would complain. “Why do people like him?” When he won
the Democratic nomination, she thought long and hard about voting for
McCain, one of the few Republicans she admired for his courage and
independence.
She didn’t in the end. One of the mysteries of the McCain campaign is why the
Arizona senator sacrificed his own unique brand to a distorted view of what
he thought Republicans wanted.
Sarah Palin, 44, his moose-hunting, shopaholic running mate, was a genuine,
red-hot political superstar. She could have reinforced McCain’s image as a
free spirit by ignoring the Republican party base, which would have loved
her anyway as the mother of a Down’s syndrome baby and champion of the
pro-life movement. The only time the Obama campaign came close to panic was
when it thought she was going to usurp his message of change. Instead, she
was directed to become a snarling attack dog.
The more she was admired by Republican men for sticking it to Obama, the more
women were reminded of the mean girl they had resented in school and hoped
would get her comeuppance. That day has come. McCain aides fell over
themselves last week to leak the most damaging material they could about the
“hillbilly from Wasilla” who was too stupid to realise that Africa was a
continent, not a country.
It didn’t have to be that way. Karl Rove, Bush’s guru, had a far more
sophisticated view of the American electorate than McCain. Bush campaigned
as a “compassionate conservative” in 2000 and expanded his electorate in
2004 by winning the votes of “security moms”, who were concerned about the
war on terror, and of a surprisingly high number of Hispanics and socially
conservative African-Americans.
In the teeth of Republican opposition, Bush tried to pass an immigration bill
that would have provided illegal immigrants with a path to US citizenship;
and he appointed the most diverse cabinet in American history, with top
posts going to Powell and Condoleezza Rice — to whom Obama acknowledges a
great debt. Bush’s daughter, Jenna, was married in Texas by an
African-American pastor, a friend and supporter who voted for Obama last
week.
Bush won the support of Americans when he urged them to strengthen the forces
of freedom and democracy. But he lost their confidence when he failed to
live up to their idealistic image of themselves.
The most dramatic plunge in his approval ratings came after Hurricane Katrina
struck New Orleans less than a year into his second term in office. His
White House staff failed to notice the squalid mess in the Superdome while
he flew over the flooded city by plane, looking down on the little people
left to struggle below. The bodies of African-Americans rotted in the
streets for days as members of the National Guard calmly looked on and ate
their sandwiches. That wasn’t who Americans thought they were.
Throughout the two-year campaign, Obama tried to play down the idea that race
mattered in America. Now that he has won and the nation is celebrating its
open-mindedness, it is possible to admit just what a factor it was. But it
wasn’t the negative drag on him that Democrats had feared. By electing him,
the nation has turned the page on its past.
AS for me, the election has notched up yet another of the bizarre coincidences
in my life. Over the decades I’ve had the luck to be in the background of
some momentous events in history. Not just my childhood in Alabama: I was in
Berlin when the Wall came down; I was in the House of Commons when Sir
Geoffrey Howe stuck the knife into Thatcher; I partied with Nelson Mandela
at his election victory celebrations; and then came the Twin Towers, which
lurched back into my memory as I watched Obama make his victory speech at
Grant Park in Chicago.
Newspaper reporters were kept away from the crowd, but I sneaked into the
television enclosure and stationed myself discreetly at the foot of the
stand. Quite by chance Henry Porter, the London editor of Vanity Fair
magazine, had the same idea and we ended up next to each other.
I had almost forgotten about Henry, whom I hadn’t seen in years. But I
suddenly remembered with a jolt that he was responsible for my presence in
America.
In the 1990s we had presented a programme together on Radio 4 called Open
Mind. When Henry moved to New York temporarily, we recorded a couple of
shows from Manhattan. One afternoon I took the ferry around the harbour with
Jane Beresford, the producer. I told her that my grandmother, an immigrant
from central Europe, had come through Ellis Island in 1902. Years later,
back in London, Jane asked me to record a Radio 4 programme about the
history of Ellis Island. As part of it we would look up my grandmother’s
records.
I had just had my son Max and had returned to work at this newspaper’s London
office. I really wasn’t sure I could fit in Jane’s idea. But I suddenly had
a flash of inspiration. I would not only record the programme; I would ask
The Sunday Times to send me as a correspondent to America.
Six months later I was on my way to New York. Jane and I set a date for
recording the programme. We resolved to meet at the southern tip of
Manhattan to catch a ferry to Ellis Island on the morning of September 11,
2001.
There we were, just a few blocks away from the World Trade Center as the
planes struck. Jane, who had arrived ahead of me, saw the second plane swoop
low over Battery Park and bury itself in the tower (I only heard the
explosion). She immediately called the BBC and was one of the first people
in the world to broadcast what she saw.
It was a surprise, to say the least, to find myself standing next to Henry at
another moment in history. I am not superstitious, but I would like to take
the opportunity to say thanks, Henry. Without you I wouldn’t have been here.
