(Wayne Brown is a well-known Trinidadian writer and columnist who now resides in Jamaica. This is the twenty-second in his Sunday Stabroek series on the US presidential election.)
So, with hardly time to draw breath, we turn this week from the pure celebration of actual excellence that was ‘Beijing’ to the four-day exercise in the rhetoric of excellence that will be the Democratic Convention, which begins tomorrow in Denver.
Still, after the radical break with America’s best traditions that’s been the dismal legacy of the Bush administration, the stakes of November’s elections could hardly be higher for the US and the world. And of crucial importance, therefore, are the party conventions about to officially launch the two campaigns.
At least a day before you read this, Obama will have announced his Veep pick — the 11th hour money is on Delaware Senator and head of the Foreign Relations Committee, Joe Biden — and no doubt the news will be good for at least two news cycles. And yet, even with that piece of canned excitement, the Democratic Convention, once thought of as an Obama coronation en route to his inevitable ascension to the presidency, is now being depicted in the US media as perhaps the Golden Boy’s last, best hope of getting a desperately needed bounce in the polls.
The Democrats’ anxiety — the product perhaps of a partly-subliminal fear that (as the Clintons are reportedly still claiming in private) Obama “can’t win” (translation: America won’t elect a black man) — may be overdone. The current maths of the probable electoral college tallies have him some 60 votes closer than McCain to going over the top, and five out of the six most recent national polls still show him leading McCain.
But the polls have been tightening. In RealClear’s poll of polls, Obama’s high single-digits lead of a month ago has shrunk to 1.7 percentage points. And, just as important at this stage, McCain is now, for the first time, attracting his own share of the ‘buzz.’ You know the Republican hive is growing excited (for the first time in the campaign) when MSNBC’s rightwing commentator Pat Buchanan turns intemperate enough to aver that Obama is “now an object of mockery in middle America.”
McCain’s resurrection accompanied the Republicans’ smear campaign. First they managed to spin Obama’s ecstatic reception in Europe into proof that he was somehow ‘un-American’ — just as John Kerry in 2004 was ‘French.’ Then there was the Paris Hilton-Britney Spears ad, with its surface mockery of Obama’s ‘celebrity’ and its subterranean clutch at the still-racist hearts of many Americans. Then came the current mainline of attack: that Obama’s call for US forces to be withdrawn from Iraq proved that he was “willing to lose a war to win an election” — a hardly-veiled charge of treason that also stoked the idea of Obama’s ‘un-American’ values and lack of patriotism. And finally there was the outbreak of the Russia-Georgia war, which the warrior McCain swarmed all over rhetorically in a happy access of Cold War bellicosity and ‘superpower’ threats — the latter lapped up by those of his supporters constitutionally unable to swallow the bitter pill of America’s impotence in the current crisis.
So now, in what’s become the dominant narrative of the US media, Obama’s lead in the polls is disappearing, and it’s McCain who’s perceived to have the ‘mojo.’ Obama thus needs — this narrative goes on — the uninterrupted spotlight of this week’s Democratic Convention in Denver. And here’s the point: it’s clear the Clintons — yes, she’s ba-a-ack! — have no intention of letting him have it.
Wielding as blackmail her 18 million primary supporters’ votes in the general, the Clinton camp first secured speaking roles for both Clintons at the convention, Hillary on Tuesday night, Bill preceding Obama’s vice-presidential nominee on Wednesday night. Then they announced that Chelsea Clinton would be introducing her mother, entrenching the dynastic tenor of the Clintons’ suddenly raised profiles. Finally, they watched from the weeds as their supporters forced the Obama camp to consent to Hillary’s name being put up for nomination and a roll call at the convention. (They could of course have squelched that bid if they’d wanted to. Instead, Hillary was caught on cell phone camera telling her supporters that she understood their need for ‘a catharsis.’)
Forget catharsis. It strains credulity to imagine that the resulting visuals — delegate heads getting up one by one and bawling, “Oklahoma declares for Hillary Clinton!” “Kentucky declares for Hillary Clinton!” — won’t wind up exciting the passions of divisiveness, perhaps to the point where the ranks of the PUMAs (“Party unity, my ass!”) wind up being swollen from the 28 per cent of Hillary Democrats currently swearing not to vote for Obama. (Eighteen per cent say they mean to vote for McCain.)
The Clintons need to move carefully, of course. If Obama does lose in November and they’re seen as having contributed to his loss — or even as not having done their best to help him get elected — the Democrats’ outrage may well be enough to debar Hillary from the nomination in 2012. But the Clintons are old pros, and it’s not difficult for them to make the right noises in public while winking at Hillary’s supporters. Quizzed last month by a reporter, Bill refused to say Obama was “ready to be President.” And Hillary has been “too tepid,” according to some who’ve heard her, in her public advocacy of Obama. (The NYT reported on Friday, of a Clinton speech in Boca Raton, Florida, that one Robin Shaffer “feared that the senator she respected and admired had not done all that she could to unify Florida’s fractured Democratic Party. Many who had supported Mrs. Clinton’s run for president shared Ms. Shaffer’s opinion… And while national polls show that her supporters have been moving toward Mr. Obama, many Clinton voters are still demanding a strong signal from her on whether to shift their allegiance.”)
Democratic optimists think that unequivocal signal will come from the Clintons this week, at the convention. Others think they know the Clintons’ game only too well. One such is Maureen Dowd, the acerbic NYT columnist. In a parody published last Wednesday, Dowd, mindful of the Clintons’ lines of attack in the second, scorched-earth phase of their nomination campaign against Obama, has Hillary telling McCain: “Oh, John, the themes you took from me are working great — painting Obama as an elitist and out-of-touch celebrity… Turning his big rallies and pretty words into character flaws, charging him with playing the race card… [And] you don’t have to worry about my army of angry women. We’ve spread the word in the feminist underground that ‘catharsis’ is code for ‘No surrender.’”
Again, it’s much too early to conclude that the sea of troubles Obama currently faces will overcome him. The convention will peak on Thursday night with his address, to a packed stadium of 75,000 cheering supporters, that may well relegate to history the Clintons’ starring roles on the previous nights. Moreover, Obama’s a fearsomely intelligent candidate; and some, aware of this, have concluded that behind the scenes he must have the Clintons locked up tight.
But the main drama of this week’s Democratic Convention now lies in waiting to see if that’s true.
