While the election of Senator Barack Obama does suggest that American politics has withstood the Bush years better than many had feared, his margin of victory in the popular vote – six percentage points – should give pause to anyone who believes radical change is coming to Washington any time soon. Six points is far from a landslide given that Obama ran against a party that led the country into two major wars (after deceitfully inventing premises for one of them), made torture into an official policy and mismanaged the economy into the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Obama’s margin seems even narrower if you consider that his campaign possessed an overwhelming financial advantage, and the man himself displayed surer political instincts than any nominee since Bill Clinton. Even so, 55 million voters, many of them swamped by political attack ads and months of shallow TV coverage, were prepared to consider the McCain/Palin ticket as a serious alternative despite their chaotic, clownish often farcical ill-preparedness in the final weeks of the campaign.
Two years ago, as the major candidates began their primary campaigns, there was much talk about how this election cycle would carry America beyond the era of divisive Rove-style politics. That hope died quickly. Long before the Republican Party tried to present Obama as a dangerous radical, Hillary Clinton’s camp had paved the way with a series of extremely Rovian attacks. After her campaign’s collapse, the press got hold of an infamous campaign memo that targeted Obama’s “lack of American roots” as a key political weakness. This was not idle chatter, as anyone with even a casual acquaintance with the mainstream news coverage will remember. As Obama’s chances of upsetting the frontrunner grew, Clinton’s allies leaked a photo of him dressed in “Muslim” clothing (a customary gesture that US politicians made on visits to exotic countries like Somalia) and the Democratic Congress woman Stephanie Tubbs Jones of Ohio − an African American − quipped that Obama had no reason to be embarrassed about being seen in his “native clothes.” Higher up the party hierarchy there was Bill Clinton who, according to Newsweek magazine, “compiled an 81-page list of all the unfair and nasty things the Obama campaign had said, or was alleged to have said, about Hillary Clinton.” President Clinton would eventually call Obama’s opposition to the war in Iraq a “fairy tale” and try to dismiss him as nothing more than a black candidate; Hillary would end up questioning his standing “among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans…” Unquestionably John McCain and Sarah Palin ran a low, dishonest campaign full of ad hominem slurs, but they were hardly the first to do so.
That Obama prevailed was certainly a testament to his exceptional patience and calm but it was also due in no small part to his campaign’s competence in the least glamorous part of US politics: fundraising. This year’s presidential election was by far the most expensive in history. The total expenditure by candidates, parties and interest groups exceeded US$5 billion, half of which was spent by individual candidates in the two main parties. More than $1.5 billion was spent by the nominees themselves. Even these figures do not give a true sense of how profligate the campaigns could be. Hillary Clinton burned through $100 million before she reached Super Tuesday (February 5), and the Obama camp blew $20 million in a losing primary campaign in Texas. During the first half of October, the Democrats spent $132 million, the GOP, with a much smaller war chest, spent half that amount.
These figures can be made to sound reasonable – earlier this week, for example, a Congressional committee heard testimony from four hedge fund managers who had earned more than $1 billion dollars last year – but that would obscure a larger point about Washington’s deep-seated attachment to ‘politics-as-usual.’ Even outside of the presidential contest, the cost of entry into US politics has risen to all-time high − this year’s House and Senate candidates raised more than $1.5 billion dollars. The Center for Responsive Politics reports that in 2008, the average Senate incumbent raised $8.3 million (to the average challenger’s $850,000) and for candidates chasing an open Senate seat an average campaign required $1.6 million. Congressional seats are not much cheaper: on average House members had raised $1.2 million by September (compared to their opponents’ $286,000) and open House seats cost half a million dollars. The Center’s executive director Sheila Krumholz summarized these statistics with the observation that “You can’t win a seat in Congress without being personally wealthy or knowing a lot of wealthy people who are willing to back you with their money.” America’s wealth-driven political culture has not changed with Obama’s victory, and it would be audaciously naïve to think that a single term, or even two, could effect the sort of social and political realignment that pundits in Europe and elsewhere, have argued for.
Barack Obama may yet become the transformative president many believe he could be, but his long trek to the White House has shown that although it may be at the threshold of a new era, America is still wrestling with many of its old racial, religious and cultural demons. His promises of reform, the hopes that drew so many out to vote for the first time, will prove to be mere words if he cannot convince the well-heeled political class to sacrifice more than it has done for a generation. In the middle of two wars and a deep recession that will be a tall order, perhaps impossible. At the best of times, Washington’s fondness for political revenge can scuttle presidential agendas that are not sufficiently bipartisan – in the current circumstances, serious change may be well nigh impossible. Obama seems to have understood this much earlier than most of his opponents and his remarkable patience and restraint so far have been reassuring. But even with his party controlling the Senate and House, President Obama will need to find something truly inspirational if he is to rouse the country from the long darkness of the Bush/Cheney years. If he cannot, his groundbreaking candidacy may well fail to produce any lasting change at all.
