Wayne Brown is a well-known Trinidadian writer and columnist who now resides in Jamaica. This is the thirteenth in his Sunday Stabroek series on the US presidential election.
The primaries are over, the ‘general’ has begun – and for millions of viewers worldwide the excitement has gone hissing out of the US 2008 elections – at least for now. It’s clear that far fewer people are paying attention to Obama-McCain than were riveted by the Hillary-Obama drama –really, the Hillary drama – a month ago. Even the 24/7 news channels have eased off their wall-to-wall elections’ coverage to deal instead with such occurrences as the recent east coast heatwave, the historic floods in the midwest, and the untimely death of NBC’s Tim Russert.
This slackening is due in about equal parts, one suspects, to campaign fatigue and the ‘human drama’ of Hillary’s desperate persistence in a race she’d already lost – a persistence which, precisely because it was based entirely on theatre, ‘spin,’ ventilated the characters of the Clintons to a degree that made them actors in a political ‘soap.’
Moreover, the general campaign has begun desultorily.
On June 3, McCain tried to gatecrash the Democrats’ nomination night with his own televised address, only to suffer his third (or fourth, or fifth) deer-in-the-headlights moment in a month. Faithfully following a teleprompter which (no doubt trying to head off the Arizonan’s penchant for scowling) obviously instructed him parenthetically to ‘Smile here!’ at least a dozen times, McCain wound up looking inanely inauthentic. Since that debacle, the aging war hero’s mainly settled for trying to tie Obama to Hamas and Nicaragua’s Noriega, and challenging him to tour Iraq – presumably in between McCain’s proposed ‘ten joint town hall meetings.’
The proposal represented the McCain camp’s fond hope that their candidate might be able to draft off Obama’s rock star appeal to avail himself of a national audience for free. Not unsurprisingly, Obama responded by agreeing to just two town hall meetings, in addition to the traditional three presidential debates. (Not good enough, sulked McCain.)
For his part, Obama failed sufficiently to vet his running-mate vetters, and suffered an early embarrassment when one of them was tied to the subprime mortgage scandal and resigned after the media dedicated two whole news cycles to him. (In the age of 24/7 news channels, the importance of any event is measured by how many ‘news cycles’ it’s deemed to be good for.)
Meanwhile, the Illinois senator embarked on a 20-city tour to promote his economic programme. But on the stump – too often reading from his notes, too seldom looking up – Obama seemed lacklustre, tired. (Perhaps he, too, was missing Hillary’s ‘human drama.’)
Last week, a Supreme Court decision that narrowly upheld the right of Guantanamo inmates to a judicial process less perfunctory than the kangaroo court of military tribunals prescribed by the Bush administration sounded a premonitory gong for the campaign to come.
McCain sided with dissenting justice Anthony Scalia in railing against the judgment – in language that seemed quite unbefitting of the Supreme Court, Scalia warned that this elementary restitution of inmates’ human rights was going to result in ‘more dead Americans’ – while Obama affirmed it.
The judgment had political consequences. It collapsed the Bush administration’s plan to carry the tribunals live on US television, beginning September 15 (sic!): a transparent toss – as The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson immediately saw – to re-animate the memory of 9-11 in the imaginations of Americans, just in time to scare them into voting out of fear for ‘tough guy’ McCain on November 3.
(Mr Bush’s stated rationale for authorizing their televising: to “provide closure for the families of victims of 9-11.”)
Then last Monday Obama appointed Patti Solis Doyle – whom Clinton had fired as her campaign manager after Super Tuesday, and who has since been estranged from her – as Chief of Staff to his yet-unannounced running mate. It was a startling slap in the face to Hillary, and it told the Clintons what most thinking observers had already deduced: that the Veep door was closed to her.
But that was all. For the rest, the first fortnight of the presidential battle between Obama and McCain has mainly been a matter of petty sniping and counter-sniping. The fact is that, in all but name, these weeks are a hiatus between the primaries and the general.
It’s already clear, however, that a major challenge for an observer of the latter will be resisting the spin of a US television culture hell bent on making a real horse race of a contest which, so far, one candidate appears to be winning comfortably.
Last week, for example, polls showed Obama winning the women’s vote by13 to 19 points (this, by comparison with Gore and Kerry, who won them by 11 and just three points respectively). But “the narrative,” as the NYT’s Frank Rich remarks, currently calls for agonizing over how many of Clinton’s “crazed women”will desert Obama for McCain. And so last week the TV talking heads ignored this apparently decisive statistic to concentrate on Obama’s ‘problem’ with white suburban women, a subgroup with whom he trails McCain by six points.
(“the notion,” Rich points out astutely, “that all female Clinton supporters became ‘angry white women’ once their candidate lost — to the hysterical extreme where even lifelong Democrats would desert their own party en masse — is itself a sexist stereotype.”)
They likewise underscored Obama’s ‘problem’ with white men, with whom he trailed McCain by 20 points. None mentioned the fact that no Democratic candidate has won the ‘white men’ demographic since 1964. Nor that Gore in 2000 won the popular vote (and the election, in the opinion of many) while losing white men by 24 points.
Rich: “NBC Nightly News was so focused on these supposedly devastating Obama shortfalls that there was no mention that the Democrat beat Mr McCain (and outperformed Mr Kerry) in every other group that had been in doubt: independents, Catholics, blue-collar workers and Hispanics. Indeed, the evidence that pro-Clinton Hispanics are flocking to Mr McCain is as nonexistent as the evidence of a female stampede. Mr Obama swamps Mr McCain by 62 per cent to 28 per cent — a disastrous GOP setback, given that President Bush took 44 per cent of the Hispanic vote in 2004. No wonder the McCain campaign no longer lists its candidate’s home state of Arizona as safe this fall.”
In fact, the likelihood is that — barring some unforeseen catastrophe imploding the Obama campaign — this is going to be the Democrat’s year, in spades — as several experts outside of the US television media are already opining.
As presidential historian Robert Dallek put it: “These things go in cycles. The public gets tired of one approach to politics. There is always a measure of optimism in this country, so they turn to the other party.”
He didn’t add that the other party’s candidate this year also happens to be the most extraordinarily gifted politician in living memory to throw his cap into the presidential ring.
But that may well be a title to which the ‘inexperienced’ Obama, a David freshly come from vanquishing not one but two Goliaths — not only Hillary but her husband, a beloved ex-President and ‘the best politician in America today’ — can justifiably lay claim.
