So it’s here at last, ‘the most important election in our lifetime,’ after a gruelling campaign from which, however, few could look away for long, since moment after moment seemed filled with such significance, both for the US and the world.
It’s a campaign that has wound up pitting two of the most powerful forces in American history, idealism and racism, against each other. And though late in the day other factors arose, complicating the playing field and tilting it towards the Golden Boy, it’s worth standing back for a moment at this eleventh hour to consider the big picture.
The United States, uniquely among the nations, was conceived and has endured as an Idea; and its hold on the world’s imagination is due only in part to its economic and military might. More subtly, yet pervasively, the US is also perceived as a stage on which a profound existential drama is forever playing itself out.
This drama comprises the unending struggle between humanity’s worse and better angels, between what is and what might be; and it began in the moment of that nation’s inception. The same Founding Fathers who declared audaciously that all men were created equal, in the next breath pegged a black slave’s worth at three-fifths the worth of a white man. So was the Idea of America assailed, at once, by the reality of American racism.
Eighty years later, the nation nearly shattered in that same epic clash. And 110 years after the Civil War, there erupted, from Lyndon Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights Act, a tectonic shift in American politics, as the old Confederate south furiously abandoned Johnson’s Democratic Party en masse in protest. (Those who didn’t bother to change their registration are today’s ‘Reagan Democrats.’)
Their power quickly made itself felt at the national level. They were Nixon’s ‘silent majority’; they gave the Republicans seven of the next 10 presidential elections; and they were the reason why, for the past 36 years, every American president has come from the south. Yet the Idea of America survived. When Watergate revealed the extent to which Nixon had fouled it, most Americans reached in disgust as far away as they could from tainted ‘Washington’ and the Republicans, to elect an unknown peanut farmer, a Democrat, from Georgia. And here’s the thing. Compared to Nixon’s transgressions, the Bush-Cheney administration’s assault on the Idea of America has been sustained, wide-ranging, and lethal.
The world, including many Americans, watched in horror — recall those million-strong demonstrations in cities across the globe, from New York to Sydney to London to Rome — as, for the first time in its history, the world’s sole superpower prepared to invade a country at peace with its neighbours. And the Iraq war of imperial expansion was accompanied by a whole series of measures — refusing to ratify ‘Kyoto,’ suspending habeas corpus, kidnapping people in the streets of foreign cities and ‘disappearing’ them into a hastily erected and far-flung network of torture camps stretching from Cuba to Poland, initiating the illegal, widespread wiretapping of its own citizenry — measures that, in a few short years, turned ‘the hope of the world’ into a blight upon the community of civilized nations and effectively into a rogue state.
Finally came Katrina, nominally a tragedy of incompetence, but fundamentally an obscenity of racist uncaring: New Orleans was black. Americans watched in shame as, for four days, a great American city was left to drown, while their President slapped the back of its nightmare’s chief culprit (“Heck of a job, Brownie!”). The American novelist Joyce Carol Oates remarked bitterly that, overnight, it seemed, the Idea of America had become “a cruel joke.”
Travelling around the US during the past three years, this columnist was struck above all by the quiet fury of Americans at the current administration’s debasement of the American Idea, and by their determination to redeem it. That fury expressed itself in the Congressional elections of 2006, which swept the Republicans from power in both the House and the Senate; and it was easy to deduce that the same tsunami of violated idealism would easily win the White House for the Democrats this year. What one didn’t know then was that this groundswell movement would find, for its leader, what Roger Cohen called in the NYT on Thursday, “a providential mestizo whose name — O-Ba-Ma — has the three-syllable universality of some child’s lullaby.”
The old Confederacy rubbed its eyes. A black man?!!!
(“Everyone in this hall is stunned,” a man at a rally rose to tell McCain, a couple of weeks ago; and in truth the man looked utterly bewildered. “How could this happen?” Watching him, one recalled the Clintons’ desperate plea to Democratic superdelegates: “He can’t win! He can’t win!”)
Whereupon the old Confederacy rose to do battle in the cause of apartheid one more time.
So now the world prepares to watch, once again, the epic clash between American idealism and American racism. The McCain attack campaign (‘unAmerican, terrorist-lover, PLO-supporter, socialist!’) has been little more than a coded summoning of white racism to the ramparts. It’s no coincidence that, for the first time in living memory, a US presidential campaign has had its rallies punctuated by cries of “Traitor!” and “Kill him!”
As for the Golden Boy, he has gone right on walking on water. Having in the primaries played David to the double-headed Goliath of Hillary and Bill Clinton, Obama had a scary fortnight in September when the Republic base found in Sarah Palin its walking wet dream. But he was soon sitting back and relaxing as Ms Palin’s carapaced ignorance, incuriosity and appalling ideological bent became apparent to most Americans.
Having braced for months to fight McCain on his own ground, that of national security, he had to have been pleasantly startled when Wall Street’s sudden meltdown made the economy the election’s focus, and more so by McCain’s spectacularly blundering attempts to exploit it.
All Obama needed after that was a chance to tell white Americans, “Relax, don’t be afraid of me, I’m not a threat to you.” And in the three debates, and again in his 30-minute infomercial last week, he got and took that chance. Now the polls have him well ahead, both nationally and in most of the battleground states — all but one of them ‘red’ states.
And yet the mood of America, and of the watching world, feels oddly schizoid as the moment approaches. In what we may call the ‘dayworld,’ the world of mathematics and rational evidence, of polls and the turnout at rallies, there’s no question but that Obama should be heading for a landslide victory. His ground game involves eight million volunteers nationally (yes, that’s eight million!); his campaign has 6,000 lawyers ready to fan out to polling stations in Florida alone. Obama’s is a methodical genius, and he has left nothing to chance.
And yet, in the nightworld of the solitary psyche, dread dogs the footsteps of hope. Who knows what recalcitrant hatred may yet emerge to play, in that other nightworld of the isolated voting booth?
Obama supporters who, by the polls, should be overweeningly confident, are not. Instead, they are ‘hopeful.’
Centuries of American racism have so wounded the soul of the world that today an enervating skepticism interrogates the dayworld’s polls. As James Jones, an African-American Obama supporter from Jacksonville, Florida, told the NYT last week: “I feel good, and I don’t feel good. I’m thankful to God that this is happening in my lifetime, that I get to see it. But I’m not ready to celebrate anything. This could be a very tricky time for us. I don’t trust the polls. And the state of Florida in the past has had a lot of crooked things going on.”
Or, as Cohen writes: “Nobody should underestimate the immense psychological leap [for Americans] that sending a black couple to the White House would represent.”
Well, we shall see. On Tuesday night, America will either awaken from its long national nightmare, or it won’t. The polls, with their sanity of mathematics, will either prove victorious over the crocodiles of the Id, or they won’t. Either the dayworld will triumph, or the nightworld will.
For what it’s worth, this columnist thinks that, after eight years of Bush-Cheney, the American Idealists mean to have their day on Tuesday, and nothing is going to stop them.
Footnote: What to look for on Tuesday night
The states where the polls close earliest (7 pm EST) are Kentucky, Georgia, Indiana and Virginia (the last, assuming the NAACP fails in its bid to get voting in Virginia extended by two hours). All are red states, and of them Kentucky is a safe McCain state. So, too, should be Georgia and Indiana, and though the polls have tightened in both in Obama’s favour, one expects them still to go to McCain. If they don’t, if Obama looks to be winning either, it’s safe to say he’s on the way to a blowout.
The important one is Virginia, a state which last voted for a Democrat in 1964, but which Obama has been determined from the start to win, and where the polls have consistently put him ahead by high single digits.
Virginia is a sharply divided state. Its north-east corner has grown fast of late, into a dormitory suburb of DC; it now comprises a third of Virginia’s population, and like DC it is heavily Democratic. (So much so that John McCain’s brother recently scoffed at it as ‘Commie.’)
The heart of Sarah Palin’s “real” (ie, ‘red’) Virginia lies to the west, in the Shenandoah valley, and McCain will win as big there as Hillary did, and as big as Obama will win in Fairfax County. But listen for the early returns from Hampton Roads, to the south-east, which includes Norfolk and Virginia Beach: a fault line where the old ‘red’ and new ‘blue’ Virginia meet.The Norfolk Naval Station is the world’s largest US Navy base. It’s home to 50,000 veterans, and more than half-a-million navy workers, and they should go heavily for McCain. And the religious right’s stronghold in Virginia Beach will have been energized by Palin.
But Hampton Roads is also more than 20 per cent African-American; and, given the staggering African-American turnout so far in such early-voting states as North Carolina and Georgia, it’s not impossible that they’ll overwhelm both the white evangelicals and McCain’s hawkish Navy workers.
So watch the early returns from Hampton Roads, in particular Virginia Beach. If McCain is winning big there, he’ll probably win the state. If, on the other hand 8 pm comes, and perhaps 9 pm, and Virginia Beach is still too close to call, it means Obama is in the process of flipping Virginia. And that’s just one of his many routes to winning the US presidency.
