The race ahead

The US presidential race has reached a juncture that is as fascinating as it was unpredictable. With both parties facing internal tensions that could deprive their nominees of significant portions of the traditional vote, the next few weeks will likely be filled with the vital horsetrading necessary in these situations if a compromise is to be reached in time for November.

Although, for all intents and purposes, John McCain has won the GOP nomination, his standing within the conservative ranks of the party has been been badly tarnished by years of maverick individualism – the very thing that endears him to Democrats and independents. Loudmouth conservatives like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter have said they would prefer Hillary Clinton in the White House than a faux conservative like McCain. Opinions like these will have to be outflanked quickly, perhaps by a judiciously chosen vice-presidential candidate, but the stubborn endurance of governor Huckabee complicates the choice considerably. If McCain tilts too far to the right he can alienate the reasonable middle which has taken him to the nomination, if he doesn’t tilt far enough he may lose a crucial part of the base vote that has given president Bush his victories.

The Democrats face a different but equally dangerous dilemma. The race between Senators Clinton and Obama has been tightening with each primary and the results from Super Tuesday (Clinton beat Obama in absolute votes – by less than half of one percent – but won fewer states) raise the possibility that the race could end in what amounts to a dead heat. That would lead to the unhappy denouement of a nominee chosen by superdelegates at a convention instead of voters at the polls. Unless someone can break the deadlock soon – and there seems no obvious way of doing this – the party’s nominee could be fatally compromised by the inevitable bickering this selection would create. It wouldn’t, perhaps, be as wounding a blow as was the intervention by the Supreme Court in Bush vs. Gore, but it is the sort of impasse the party’s leadership would much rather be without.

The Clinton camp has increasingly been hoist on its own petard. One of its early objections to Obama was that he wasn’t electable, but a series of decisive victories in the primaries has made nonsense of that idea. Whispers about his (freely admitted) drug use as a young man also failed to take root. President Clinton’s direct attacks – insinuating (wrongly) that Obama’s opposition to the invasion of Iraq was a “fairytale” and that his South Carolina victory showed only that he appealed to black voters – have cast the Clintons in a most unflattering light, showing that they are not above the sort of tactics they have long decried in the Republican party. Obama’s ability to survive their slings and arrows, virtually unscathed, has shown him to be a far more formidable campaigner than his rivals would have the public believe. His restrained response has also proved that he would almost certainly be the better candidate to send up against John McCain.

The young voters Obama has brought out in such large numbers are unlikely to support Mrs Clinton if she wins the nomination, especially if she is appointed by superdelegates at the convention. Obama, having done much less to alienate Clinton voters, is far more likely to be able to co-opt her base voters if he wins. Furthermore, faced with a Republican candidate whose war record is unimpeachable, and one whose long years of service in the Senate makes both Clinton and Obama look like novices, the Democrats are far more likely to lean towards a nominee who can offer something more than policy arguments, a little inspiration perhaps. Obama wins that contest hands down.

On the last two occasions in which a non-military Democrat beat a Republican war hero with far more political experience, a decisive factor was the ‘vision thing’ – that much derided ability to discuss political action in the widest possible terms. Bush the elder and Bob Dole were completely overmatched by Bill Clinton’s grasp of the political zeitgeist, his intuitive ability to say the right words and do the right things at the right time. The final irony of Mrs Clinton’s campaign may well turn out to be that she has created the conditions for a similar candidacy but proved herself inadequate to its demands.