Ian Boyne
Barack Obama is just hours away from creating history by being the first African American to be elected president of the United States. His engaging intellect, emotional intelligence, charisma, sense of timing, plus his brilliant campaign, have helped enormously. But fortuitous circumstances as well as the ineptitude of the McCain campaign have also provided a boon.
The election of Barack Obama as president of the United States will not just be a statement about America's coming of age with regard to race. The race factor will be seismic in terms of just the notion of a black man finally reaching the White House, but there are other seismic changes taking place in the American political landscape which many have missed.
Excellent commentary
Democratic presidential candidate, Senator Barack Obama, D-Ill., speaks at a rally in Kissimmee, Florida, on Wednesday, October 29. - AP
Indeed, the trends have been developing for some time but were manifested clearly with the election of the Democrats to Congress in the mid-term election of 2006. One of the finest commentaries I have seen on the American political scene has been provided by Steve Fraser, co-editor of the American Empire Project book series on the TomDispatch website.
"Turning point elections are brought on by a general crisis in the old order, an impasse or breakdown so severe it can no longer be addressed by conventional wisdom of the political status quo," he wrote long before the financial meltdown. He went on to write perceptively that, "System-wide crises prove fatal, first of all because they exhaust the repertoire of political solutions available (or imaginable) to the ruling circles of the old order. Elites become increasingly defensive and inflexible, so much so that their actions aggravate rather than alleviate the crisis at hand."
This aptly describes the Republican Party. They are in a time warp. They have been totally overtaken by social forces and are absolutely clueless as to how to respond. So they vainly try to associate Barack Obama with assorted terrorists and radicals, label him a socialist - a well-worn scare tactic - paint him as being unable to secure American interests, etc. Their whole argument about a redistribution of wealth is so absurd and politically inept as to defy description.
Wealth distribution
How can a campaign project wealth distribution be a bad thing when Main Street is in revolt over Wall Street; when it is felt that Washington has been engaged in nothing if not the redistribution of ordinary Americans' wealth to fat cats and corrupt, greedy CEOs?
How can you speak against redistribution when even the notion of progressive taxation is based on redistribution?
The McCain campaign is espousing a capitalism so backward and regressive as to be repulsive to the American people - and the campaign is oblivious to that. That their campaign is in total disarray is well-documented magazine cover story last Sunday.
The GOP has totally misread the mood of the American people, amazingly, for even the blind should be able to see.
Barack Obama's infomercial last Wednesday night, for which he paid US$4 million to attract nearly 34 million viewers, was an impressive, emotionally appealing masterpiece. The Nation magazine, in an immediate reaction to the infomercial on its website, described it in an article as 'A Chronicle of Despair, A Promise of Change'.
"The commercial was a chronicle of despair. Sick people are having a hard time paying for medicine. Old people are working hard to make ends meet. Teachers are taking second jobs to pay for food. Third-generation factory workers are watching their American dreams that they once took for granted turn into nightmares or dislocation and declining prospects."
The McCain campaign, with its hysteria over national security and bogeyman of socialism, are out of sync with the American people and they will see that on Tuesday. Don't miss the fact that The Obama phenomenon is not just about blacks or liberals coming into the mainstream. It is about shifts taking place in the right itself and the Republican Party's not being able to accommodate that.
Significant shifts
When the Economist magazine can endorse Obama, as it does in its just-released issue, you know some significant shifts are taking place and that the Republican Party is in tatters.
But let's look at some hard, cold facts which tell a story. Obama is leading in states which have traditionally gone to the Republicans. He is leading in Virginia which was last carried by a Democratic sweep in 1964.
According to a Wall Street Journal/NBC/ MY Space poll, Obama has 69 per cent of the new and returning voters (there are nine million new voters on the list this year, thanks to the Obama campaign's remarkable canvassing). Obama is leading in many states taken by Bush in 2004.
But what is shocking is that Obama and McCain are in a statistical dead-heat among evangelicals. This is stunning.
Sarah Palin was brought in to shore up that fundamentalist/evangelical base and even many there recognise that being born-again is not enough of a qualification to run the most powerful nation in the world if the man over his allotted three scores and 10 is taken by the good Lord.
Statistical dead heat
Surprisingly, too, in rural America, traditionally more conservative, Obama is in a statistical dead heat with McCain. McCain is supposed to be way ahead in these constituencies. And the Nation magazine has quoted the fact that a Gallup Poll shows that Jews are more likely to vote for Obama by a more than three to one majority - 74 per cent versus 22 per cent.
As Steve Fraser had predicted from February 2007, the Republican Party seems on its way to become "an extremist rump, reduced to a few stronghold states and obsessed with causes that seem not to matter to the general public".
The hot-button social issues which were big in the last election - abortion, gay marriage, the definition of marriage, church-state relations - have faded as bread-and-butter issues have taken centre stage.
Even foreign policy issues have receded. In July 2007, pollsters for both the New York Times and CBS News asked respondents to name the issues they considered most important and which would determine which candidate they would vote for.
The top choice for both Repub-licans and Democrats was national security and foreign policy - Iraq for Democrats and terrorism for Republicans.
In a poll taken by the same group in mid-October, 57 per cent of the respondents cited the economy as the top issue. Only nine per cent cited terrorism and seven per cent the Iraq war. Too bad for John McCain.
The crisis on Wall Street has widened the class antagonisms and the Democrats have played skilfully on that.
I am not convinced that Obama's economic policies are workable, but American voters, like their counterpart in Jamaica, are hardly in a mood for rational calculations.
Not enough security talk
The right-wing Weekly Standard magazine, knowing that the Republican Party can't hold its own on the economy, bemoans the fact that McCain is not speaking enough about national security issues (see its November 3 issue - 'The Disappearing Issue of Election 08'). Economic populism has trumped social conservatism in this election. It is as though Providence favours Obama (though I would not go there!).
The increasing criticisms about Sarah Palin, even from her own camp, indicate that her value has been dissipated. She was to appeal to that socially conservative base, but even there, some doubt her suitability and even they have seen her intellectual vacuousness.
Robert Draper recently said of Palin: "It's a grim binary choice but apparently it came down (with the McCain campaign) to whether to make Palin look like a scripted robot or an unscripted ignoramus." Well put.
Even Republican Senator Chuck Hagel has expressed serious reservations about Sarah Palin in a recent New Yorker magazine profile of him.
Thinnest-résumé candidate
Says Hagel in that article: "There is no question that this candidate is arguably the thinnest-résumé candidate for vice-president in the history of America."
Her selection shows John McCain's incredible recklessness and bad judgment. The Economist says the choice of Palin "epitomised (McCain's) sloppiness".
It is a decision he will regret, though he could never have foreseen that Wall Street would have crashed, thus taking his dreams with it. Too bad for John McCain but much better for the international community, exhausted by the hubris of the Bush foreign policy.
Ian Boyne is a veteran journalist who may be reached at ianboyne1@yahoo.com. Feedback may also be sent to columns@gleanerjm.com.
