When the Governor of New Hampshire, John Lynch, introduced his guest of honour at a rally to celebrate the state’s Democratic routing of the Republicans in the recent mid-term elections, he shared a secret with the large, boisterous crowd.
”We originally scheduled the Rolling Stones,” he said, ”but we cancelled them when we realised Senator Obama would sell more tickets.” He was rewarded with an outbreak of ecstatic whooping. But behind his joke there was a truth. Barack Obama had indeed sold the tickets — the ballroom of the Radisson hotel in Manchester was packed, its 1 500 tickets sold out.
Even seasoned observers of New Hampshire politics were rubbing their eyes in disbelief. The state is the stomping ground of would-be American presidents: every four years it is the first to hold primary elections for the presidential candidates of both main parties and as such carries an influence far greater than its diminutive size. Its residents have grown blasé about being ritually courted by national political figures.
But this was different. There was nothing blasé about Sunday’s reception for the senator from Illinois. When Lynch suggested that Obama might run, someone shouted ”Run Obama! Run!” and the crowd erupted again.
And it’s not just in New Hampshire that Rolling Stones fever is taking hold.
Obama’s new book, The Audacity of Hope, is number two in the bestseller lists of The New York Times and Amazon. His face beams out of the covers of glossy magazines: he has been profiled by Time, Newsweek, Men’s Vogue, Harper’s, New York magazine. In each, the authors grapple with political mass hysteria, unseen in Democratic circles since the early days of Bill Clinton or even the adoration of the Kennedy brothers. As Joe Klein put it in Time: ”Obama seemed the political equivalent of a rainbow — a sudden preternatural event inspiring awe and ecstasy.”
Obama appears to be remaining impressively calm in the face of such billowing adulation. He told reporters: ”I am suspicious of hype. The fact that my 15 minutes of fame has extended a little longer than 15 minutes is somewhat surprising to me.”
The comment is classic Obama — part self-deprecation, part dissembling. The question of whether he will stand for president or not has become the obsessive talking point for Democrats, and he likes it that way. His official line is that he is weighing up his options, but occasionally his language slips. At one point, talking to reporters, he compared himself to ”the other candidates”, revealing a firmness of purpose he has so far kept hidden.
As for those other candidates, only two Democrats have so far announced their intention of standing: Iowa’s Governor, Tom Vilsack, and Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana. Hillary Clinton is expected to make her declaration of intent in the new year.
Yet it is in comparison with Clinton that both Obama’s strengths and weaknesses become most apparent.
His mother was white and from Kansas and his father was from Kenya and bequeathed his name to his son, but left the family to return home when Barack Jnr was just two. Obama plays heavily upon his racial and cultural origins in his books and speeches, endearing him to black and white audiences alike.
Then there is his age, at 45, which sets him apart from Clinton, 14 years his senior, and gives him claim to representing a new generation.
But questions of race and inexperience regularly arise. ”Is the US ready for a black president?” is hurled even more frequently at him than the question of a woman president is at Clinton. He faced it squarely on Sunday.
”Race is still a powerful force in this country, and there are certain stereo-types I will have to deal with. But I find that when people get to know you they will judge you on your merits.”
Mark Mellman, a Washington-based pollster, believes that among Democratic supporters in the primaries the race will be in Obama’s favour: ”People will grab the chance to make positive history — nominating the first black candidate for president.”
His lack of experience is harder to answer. Obama has spent two years in the Senate compared with Clinton’s six. Crucially, though, lack of experience is an advantage when those with experience are perceived to have got the US into such a mess. It means he is free of awkward voting histories — he can claim to have opposed the Iraq war when Clinton backed it.
When he stood up before the crowd in New Hampshire, he played on that: ”We must understand that the might of our military has to be matched by the strength of our diplomacy.”
That was just one of several buttons guaranteed to elicit yet more Democratic adulation: energy independence, raising the minimum wage, better pay for teachers, fiscal responsibility and universal health care. But what most inflamed the crowd was when he spoke about the American Dream.
”What’s hard, what demands courage, what’s truly audacious, is to hope,” he said. ”People are hungry for something new. They are interested in being part of something larger than the petty politics we have seen in the past few years. This is our time — a new generation that is preparing to lead.” — Â