(Wayne Brown is a well-known Trinidadian writer and colum-nist who now resides in Jamaica. This is the sixteenth in his Sunday Stabroek series on the US presidential election.)
By any ‘real world’ measure, last week was a big week for Barack Obama. A major NBC poll showed his avowed presidential campaign plan — to “redraw the electoral map” and put a number of hitherto ‘red’ states into play — seemed, startlingly early, to already be bearing fruit. New Mexico and Colorado, tilted by a large pro-Obama swing among Hispanic voters, were leaning Democratic for the first time. A substantial surge in Democratic registration in Nevada was giving Obama a whopping 55,000-vote lead over McCain there.
Wisconsin was falling into Obama’s column; blood-red Missouri had drifted into the ‘toss-up’ column; and Wash-ington, Connecticut and Maine, which had been ‘leaning’ towards Obama, were now considered safe Obama states.
By contrast, the McCain camp has been putting its hope for victory in making a clean sweep of Michigan and Ohio (which Bush won in 2004) and Pennsylvania. The last is a Kerry state where, however, Obama’s emphatic rejection by the Rust Belt crowd following his ‘bitter-cling’ remark had the McCain camp licking its collective chops. But last week’s poll showed Obama holding Pennsylvania and taking Ohio — by high and low single digits, respectively — and pulling within striking distance of McCain in Michigan.
The NBC poll, which just a month ago had projected a 200-200 tie in the electoral college, was now skewing to Obama 210 to 189 (with 11 states, representing 139 electoral votes, considered toss-ups).
Last week too, Ras-mussen’s pollsters — working off the conventional wisdom that in a presidential election the candidate who captures the ideological centre wins — reported that Obama had recently done a much better job than McCain of “moving to the middle” in the minds of voters (the point, no doubt, of his recent flipflops on everything from gun control to the death penalty to FISA). In the past month, those who see him as a liberal have dropped from 67 to 56 per cent, and the ‘Very Liberal’ assessments were down from 36 to 22 per cent — this, while the perception of McCain as a conservative remained almost steady at 67 to 66 points.
Indeed if, as several commentators (including this writer) have been projecting, Obama is heading for a blowout, 30-state victory in November, the dawning lineaments of that emphatic outcome became clearly visible for the first time last week.
Additionally, and almost gratuitously, events went Obama’s way as well last week.
For starters, the Iraqi government demanded a timeline from the Bush administration for the withdrawal of Ameri-can troops. That startling turn played, of course, right into the hands of a campaign based, as Obama’s has been all along (at least, until he talked about ‘refining’ his position recently) on a promise to withdraw from Iraq. It also left the White House somewhat desperately trying to spin the Iraqis’ demand as a rhetorical ploy intended purely for domestic consumption. McCain is a Bush surrogate on Iraq, as in many things, and clearly intends as president to establish permanent US military bases there. He has therefore been trumpeting the goal of “victory” in Iraq (whatever that means); and so the Iraqis’ demand last week put him in an untenable position. In 2004, McCain had rather carelessly agreed with an interviewer that “If the Iraqis ask us to leave then of course we’ll leave”; now it became necessary for him to abandon that moderate line and be seen for what he is: a neocon, bent on the long-term occupation of Iraq, against the wishes of 72 per cent of the American electorate.
Next, re-tired Republican ex-senator Phil Gramm, McCain’s close friend and chief economic advisor, airily explained to the media that Americans were merely going through a “mental” recession; America, Gramm opined, had become “a nation of whiners.” In a time when millions of Americans have lost their jobs and/or homes, the remark was likely to elicit real fury. And while McCain wasted no time in cutting Gramm loose, Gramm has been as close to McCain, and for nearly as long, as the Reverend Wright was to Obama. It’s unlikely some of his fat-cat’s blissful uncaring for the tragic plight of many Americans won’t stick to McCain.
Finally there was Jesse Jackson, who, when he thought the mike was off, first whispered to a black Fox TV interviewer (naively trusting the ‘black’ and not reckoning with the ‘Fox’ part) his condemnation of Obama’s call for African-American men to take responsibility for their children. Then Jackson added, with crass machismo: “I wanna cut his nuts off.” Fox of course played the tape, and so Jackson ended up inadvertently doing Obama almost as much good with white working-class American voters as Jeremiah Wright had done him harm. Apologising afterwards, Jackson cut a genuinely tragic figure. He had fought in the civil rights’ movement, as he reminded viewers, for 54 years; yet now, here he was, having (as Trinidadians would say) to ‘crawl’ before an upstart brown kid who overnight had become arguably the most powerful man in America.
It’s seldom one sees the torch being passed to a new generation in a way so humiliating to the retrenched old guard. Granted, he brought it on himself, but the Reverend Jesse Jackson deserved a better exit into the autumnal pines.
Such poll results and unexpected gifts to Obama had the effect of muting the continuing anguish of those who felt, and feel, betrayed by Obama’s recent swerves to the right. Bob Herbert’s New York Times column, ‘Lurching with Abandon’ (which echoed point by point this column last Sunday) chided the “man who first turned voters on by presenting himself as some-one…who wouldn’t engage in the terminal emptiness of politics as usual,” and ended, with real sorrow: “Time flies and the Iowa caucuses seem a very long time ago.”
Twenty-two thousand Obama supporters flooded Obama’s website to protest his breaking of his promise to filibuster a FISA bill giving retroactive immunity to tele-communications companies that participated in the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping programme.
In ‘Barack W. Bush’, RealClear columnist Victor Hanson itemized the extent to which Obama had gone recently to follow in the footsteps of “the worst president in American history” (Jimmy Carter).
And a columnist on the right wrote: “Obama seems to have lumped the wonks [for ‘wonks’ read Obama’s base support: WB] in with the bouncing kids for whom he need only be young and cool. He no doubt calculates that, happy or not, the left has nowhere else to go. But the speed with which he chucked his promises suggests that he also regarded the intellectuals as an easier sell than they thought themselves.”
It was a two-edged jeer, but it was also undeniable. In Obama, America is getting to know an immensely smart, charismatic and brilliant orator, who both is black and happens to be black, and who has made it clear he has no intention of being another idealistic Democrat loser (‘like George McGovern’).
If he has hurt and angered his core supporters, it’s because he’s calculated he can live with their punishment — which is “to vote for him but not work for him,” as one Obama blogger put it, with unintended pathos, last week.
In a mere two weeks, Obama has shed much of his endangering ‘liberal’ label. And his road to the presidency now looks clear.
