In news that will, I suspect, come as just as profound a relief to you as it does to me, I dearly hope – if I believed, I would even pray – that this is my penultimate post on this bloody election: I hope that come Wednesday we can all wake up and get on with our lives.
It may come as a surprise but I don’t personally know all of the 150,000,000 Americans expected to cast a ballot on Tuesday but, one way or another, I know quite a few US citizens. Most of them originate from or now live in the largely Democratic states on the east or west coasts. Indeed, most of them are Democrats.
And yet not one of those I have asked would have voted for Al Gore rather than John McCain in 2000, had McCain secured the Republican nomination instead of Dubya.
Eight years ago, had he not been the victim of a malicious and racist smear campaign during the primaries orchestrated by Bushites (emphasis on the second syllable), McCain – generally perceived to be a relatively straight-talking, relatively liberal Republican and a relatively decent bloke (albeit with a legendarily foul temper) with a relatively good line in self-deprecating humour – would have strolled into the White House with the goodwill of much of the country: Gore v McCain would not have had to have been decided by the bench of the Supreme Court.
That McCain has spent the last six months flailing around haplessly and, latterly, helplessly while helming a despicable campaign bursting at the seams with racist smears and innuendos about his opponent is a genuine source of sadness to some of the Americans I know who lean (oh so gently) to the left of centre.
A good number of them are deeply ambivalent about Barack Obama, whom some perceive to have no more substance than Tony Blair. As Gary Younge wrote in yesterday’s Guardian:
His two years in the Senate suggested he was pretty mainstream and even, at times, a little suspect. He’d supported Joseph Lieberman (a Democrat who is now supporting John McCain) in his primary Senate campaign against an anti-war campaigner. And he voted to confirm Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state. It wasn’t obvious to me that he would be any better than some other generic Democrat with different pigmentation.
None doubt the symbolic significance of any African American running for the Presidency but surprisingly few are actually excited about Obama himself. A couple have said they believe him to be too intellectual, too distant, too self-possessed; and whatever else he has going for him it is difficult to imagine spending a really entertaining afternoon in the pub shooting the shit with Obama.
That an aloof and academically-minded lawyer such as Obama still apparently sits – 48 hours before voting day – five to ten points ahead of a down-at-home, folksy, All-American hero like McCain in the national polls is in many ways remarkable.
Americans do seem to like their leaders to be good ole boys who connect with them on a personal, emotional level: since the war, at least, elected Oval Office cold fish like Nixon and Bush, Sr. are rarer on the ground than the touchier, feelier Kennedys, Reagans, Clintons and Dubyas.
How has it come to this?
For once, a majority of Americans seems not have been prepared to be swayed by liars and smear merchants – the very people who did for McCain in 2000 and whom he has embraced into his campaign. For once, playing the race card has not worked.
Sometimes the Republicans’ racism has been en passant:
“John McCain: the American president Americans have been waiting for.”
- voiceover on a television advertisement “approved by” John McCain
“We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation.”
- Bible Spice approves of North Carolina; New York, not so much
“As a proud resident of Oakton, Virginia, I can tell you that the Democrats have just come in from the District of Columbia and moved into northern Virginia – that’s really what you see there. But the rest of the state – real Virginia, if you will – I think will be very responsive to Senator McCain’s message.”
- Nancy Pfotenhauer, senior adviser to John McCain, on MSNBC
Maybe it’s unintentional, but in such a multi-cultural society as America it seems hard to conclude it an accident that all the faces in the McCain ads that speak of “socialism” and “wealth redistribution” are white (and mostly aged 40+), leaving the unspoken intimation that white people’s taxes are going to be paying for welfare payments to lazy, indolent black masses.
Or, perhaps more accurately, I was prepared initially to consider it unintentional. Then McCain went on Larry King Live:
KING: Concerning “spreading the wealth”: isn’t the graduated income tax “spreading the wealth”? If you and I paid more so that Jimmy can get some for him, or pay for a welfare recipient, that’s “spreading the wealth”.
MCCAIN: Well, that’s spreading the wealth in the respect that we do have a graduated income tax. That’s a far cry from taking from one group of Americans and giving to another. I mean, that’s dramatically different. Senator Obama clearly has talked for years [about] redistributive policies. And that’s not the way we create wealth in America.
One more time again: “taking from one group of Americans and giving to another“.
This is rancid, despicable, reprehensible stuff.
Does anybody have a dog whistle I can borrow?
Sometimes the Republicans’ racism has been a little less subtle…
An official Republican Party mailing in Virginia
…including the entirely needless and jarring references to Obama’s middle name, Hussein – which can serve no purpose other than to seek to associate one Hussein with another and to seek to portray the practising Christian Obama as a Muslim.
Into the more overt category falls the recent invocation by Senator McCain of Rashid Khalidi in a further attempt to smear Obama. Obama was friendly with Rashid Khalidi when the latter was a professor at the University of Chicago. Khalidi is now a professor at Columbia University in New York.
In a New York Times story filed 26 years ago, two journalists cited Khalidi as a spokesman for the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. Khalidi has denied ever being in such a position but he is in favour of the creation of a Palestinian state as part of a two-state peace settlement and has been critical of Israeli policy towards the Palestinian: as the American son of exiled Palestinians, this stance is not entirely surprising.
It did, however, permit McCain to make this extraordinary statement in a Miami radio interview:
We should know about their relationship, including, apparently, information that is held by the Los Angeles Times concerning an event that Mr. Ayers attended with a PLO spokesman. The Los Angeles Times refuses to make that videotape public. I’m not in the business of talking about media bias, but what if there was a tape with John McCain with a neo-Nazi outfit being held by some media outlet? I think the treatment of the issue would be slightly different.
Excuse ME?!
McCain may need to win Florida (with its large Jewish communities) but does a previously honourable man really want it so badly that he’s prepared to sink so low as to disseminate racism while simultaneously invoking the Holocaust?
Even if Khalidi were involved with the PLO 30 years ago, the PLO is in any event now America’s ally in Palestine against Hamas: you’d think that McCain, a self-proclaimed expert in foreign affairs, would be aware of this.
In any event, I’m not aware that it is a criminal offence to be an academic with an Arabic name, even in “real”, “pro-American” America.
It’s a strange world when politicians can be criticised for associating with university professors, but this is the second time McCain has tried to use this tactic on Obama in recent months. It didn’t work the first time – in respect of William Ayers (a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago who was, 40 years ago, a member of a terrorist organisation in the USA) – and it backfired again in respect of Khalidi, not least when it was revealed soon afterwards that McCain served as chairman of the International Republican Institute during the 1990s when it provided grants worth $500,000 to Khalidi’s Center For Palestine Research And Studies.
The first point is that a man with a dark-skinned adopted daughter has chosen to take the moral low road. Nobody with half-an-inch of brain could possibly believe that such blatant racism would win more than a few votes, let alone someone who said eight years ago that there is “a special place in Hell” set aside for racist smearmongers.
And the second, clinching point is that Republicans should not be standing by and letting such smears pass. Paraphrasing Colin Powell during his recent Meet The Press interview, the Minister cites with approval fellow blogger Lawrence of Cyberia:
When John McCain says that Obama’s aquaintance with Rashid Khalidi proves he consorts with terrorists, the correct answer is not: “But McCain knows him too!”. The correct answer is: “Rashid Khalidi is not a terrorist. He is an Arab-American, and a supporter of Palestinian national rights. Neither one of those things makes him a terrorist, and I reject your racist assumption that ‘Arab-American’ or ‘Palestinian’ are synonyms for ‘terrorist’.”
The polls suggest that the majority of Americans are simply not buying the shit being peddled by the increasingly tawdry McCain-Palin ticket. There are, however, inevitably a large number of easily-led simpletons in a population of 250 million:
At least this billboard in Missouri wasn’t official.
Remind me to visit Ohio sometime soon…
Photograph © Brett Marty 2008
Even Fox News has found itself having to put straight the lies of idiots as polling day approaches:
CNN, too, mercifully took a hopelessly inept official McCain spokesmen to task on this same point:
And The Washington Post told Senator McCain exactly where he should stick his “increasingly reckless ad hominem attacks” and “vile smear[s]“.
For once the Republican’s traditional negativity has not worked. In fact, it has failed so spectacularly that we have had the risible spectacle of the risible Republican nominee for Vice President whining to radio presenters that criticism of her campaigning is unconstitutional:
If [the media] convince enough voters that that [it] is negative campaigning for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations, then I don’t know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media.
Of course the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, for those (a) still reading this Russian novel of a rant, and (b) vaguely interested, prohibits laws that impinge either freedom of speech or the freedom of the press. Thus, media criticism of Youbetcha’s speeches is actually a doublefold example of the First Amendment operating precisely as the Founding Fathers intended. To quote Glenn Greenwald of Salon:
Is it even possible to imagine more breathtaking ignorance from someone holding high office and running for even higher office?
In the face of such ill-thought-out, illogical and unpleasant nonsense, Obama has simply had to stand still and keep his temper. Watching this election campaign from afar has been like watching a vastly superior boxer stand in the centre of the ring, allowing his weaker opponent to run himself out of energy and clarity of thought while throwing punches that don’t remotely come close to landing.
Obama may not be the Messiah but, in this election, nor is he the very naughty boy.
He’s conducted himself with decorum and, commendably, treated his opponent with unearned respect.
He’s not Jed Bartlet – he’s not even Matt Santos – and I can’t get excited about him in the way I think I would have done about Robert Kennedy, the only social democrat ever to get within sniffing distance of the Oval Office. But he has been 2008′s best candidate by a country mile: he’s conducted the best campaign and been the most consistent, logical, thoughtful, coherent and – here’s that word again – eloquent candidate. He appears at least to give a damn about something more than himself.
On that basis, and while I may not expect all that much from an Obama presidency, just in case there is any confusion on the point, the Minister officially and wholeheartedly endorses Barack Obama for the Presidency of the United States of America.
Vote early. Vote often.
Man, some things… it just gets frightening sometimes.
Bye, John. Thanks for playing.
Thanks for this excellent summing up post.
One thing struck a nerve, which is the Tony Bliar comparison I was imagining too. I expressed similar reservations about Obama to an old university friend of mine who, being a project finance partner at Linklaters who specialises in financing renewable energy power stations and therefore has lots of time on his hands at the moment, has read Obama’s book.
He says he thinks Obama is a) a brilliant man (as opposed to merely a brilliant politician) and b) someone with a clear vision and real substance. I don’t think it is appropriate to accuse Tony Blair of either a) or b).
If this is half right, then the Tony Blair clone we’re all worried about will have been a figment of our imagination.
I would ask Obama to be as risk-taking and brave in office as he has been risk-averse and cautious in his campaign. That’s the RIGHT way around, when the people of America are naturally behind you. Even if your name does sound a bit like Iraq Hussein Osama.