At the end of another long week of negative American politics, Oscar Wilde’s epigram that “a man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies” has rarely seemed wiser. Just as Senator Obama’s campaign against Senators Clinton and McCain needed a shot in the arm, who should oblige but President Bush himself, clumsily warning Israel’s parliament about those who “seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.” Could any freshman senator have dreamed of a better endorsement than to be smeared, so groundlessly, by a president whose foreign policies are now a byword for diplomacy that lacks any suasion or ingenuity whatsoever?
Obama’s leading detractors continue to bolster his case that America needs a new kind of politics. Mrs Clinton’s shrillness, her camp’s scorched-earth strategies in the face of insurmountable odds, have shown, as clearly as any “vast, rightwing conspiracy” might have, that in modern America, for quite some time, “politics as usual” has been morally bankrupt. In fact Mrs Clinton’s willingness to go negative seems to have opened a Pandora’s box of easy cynicism elsewhere in the system. Nowhere was this more evident than in the infamous ABC debate before the Pennsylvania primary in which both Clinton and Obama spent forty-five minutes dodging questions about gaffes they had made during the primary season: as though their personal psychodramas mattered more than the country’s multiple economic crises, failing infrastructure and two costly foreign wars. And yet, although the mainstream media have been damnably complicit in this dumbing down of the political conversation, voters have repeatedly shown that the era of political soap operas may have run its course. Of course the political operatives who will supervise the general election campaigns in both parties have a vested interest in this not happening, but it is not yet clear whether their cynicism will prevail over the voters’ persistent refusal to behave as millions of dollars of political advertising tell them to.
Senator McCain, after promising to take the high road and run a respectful campaign, quickly let it be known that Hamas would prefer to have Obama as US Commander in Chief because a McCain presidency would be their “worst nightmare.” That this imagined nightmare might in fact be a bonanza for the jihadist recruiters – much as the nightmare of the Bush presidency has been – does not seem to have occurred to the senator. But in the absence of any attractive, or non-military new ideas from the McCain campaign, few in the GOP have a better solution to the growing challenge of Obama’s candidacy.
Having survived a series of low-level attacks (that he’s a closet Muslim, a black radical, no friend to Israel, too inexperienced, elitist, unpatriotic or inclined to appeasement) Obama is beginning to look to Republican strategists distressingly like a teflon candidate to whom no mud sticks. His polite, cerebral manner and his preternatural calm in the face of political pressure simply do not fit the template of divide-and-conquer politics that has guided Washington for so long. For every scurrilous move on their part he improvises a frustratingly clever countermove.
Obama has also attracted millions of new voters into the process and altered the dynamics of the campaign in ways that have repeatedly confounded the predictions of many seasoned and well-paid pollsters and strategists. His steady progress towards the presidency is an embarrassing reminder to them that America has begun to change in ways that most of its political elite have yet to understand. Part of the Obama phenomenon has been this ability to convert the country’s desire for new leadership into political capital before many of his rivals were even prepared to acknowledge doubts about the status quo. If he continues to exploit this longing as effectively as he has done so far (his campaign has raised record sums of money from more than a million donors; at a recent rally he reportedly drew a crowd of 75,000) it is hard to see what an avuncular but lack-lustre figure like John McCain might do to arrest his momentum.
Even so, there is a considerable downside to the ongoing quarrels among the Democrats. When the primaries began there was much talk of a new era of post-racial, class-neutral and gender-blind politics. That hope has been dimmed by months of campaigning that have increasingly split the party into bitter, apparently irreconcilable factions. And yet, even with the season now ending in an unwholesome cocktail of racist, xenophobic and fear-mongering slurs – in both parties – there still remains a small but significant prospect that the upcoming elections might be a watershed after all.
Ironically, most of the signs that this could happen have come from public reactions to the least edifying aspects of the campaigns so far. In effect, when asked, subliminally, whether they dare trust a black man who doesn’t wear a flag-pin and adopt traditional jingoistic postures whenever possible, an impressive number of Americans have either pointedly ignored the question or focused on the almost-forgotten “issues” that were meant to drive the campaigns all along. With any luck this independent streak might continue till November.
