Panning across the faces of the country’s leaders gathered in the Cabinet Room to confront the ”financial crisis” in late September, the camera’s eye moves from the president — looking tired, shrunken, desiccated — to his treasury secretary and other powerful advisers, and then slowly makes its way down the Cabinet table, trailing over the familiar waxen features of the barons of the Senate and the House, lingering for a moment on the self-consciously resolute face of the white-haired John McCain, and finally reaches the table’s end where it settles at last on the figure of a lean, solitary black man slumped in his seat.
He seems composed — and strikingly, powerfully isolated. In how many such rooms holding how many such powerful people in the recent and distant past has his been the only black face?
The radicalism of Barack Obama lies not in his policies but in his face. It is a radicalism not just of colour but of emergence, for scarcely a year ago that face was utterly unknown to the overwhelming majority of Americans.
Obama has arisen out of a plain of scorched earth, a longed-for rebirth at the logical limit of an exhausted politics. Seven years after September 11 the ”wartime president” has brought his War on Terror to a dead end in the bloody stalemate in Iraq, where American dollars now fund both the Iranian-allied Shi’ite government and the former Baathist insurgents, and on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, where $10-billion of US aid now buys the bullets that Pakistani soldiers fire at US special forces hunting a resurgent Taliban and al-Qaeda.
At home the president turned huge surpluses into vast deficits, more than doubling the national debt.
This astonishing record has made the only president brought to power by the Supreme Court the most unpopular since modern polling began, leading more than eight Americans in 10 to conclude that the country is ”on the wrong track” and millions to change their party identification from Republican to Democrat.
Obama’s rise is inexplicable without that shrunken figure in the Cabinet Room, whose waning shadow still looms over this election. Though Obama evokes the theme of a new bipartisanship with great eloquence and power, he promises the bounties of a traditional Democrat: a middle-class tax cut, healthcare for nearly everyone, investments in roads, money for early childhood education and job training.
Behind the eloquently intoned mantra of a new politics of hope lies a movement fuelled by a deep-seated sense of rebellion — against ”politics as usual”, against ”experience” as a political value (and the older generation that holds it as such), against ”Washington” and all the evils that that word evokes. His populism is brilliantly engineered and inspiring in its eloquence — and, in its essence, deeply familiar.
And yet there is the radicalism of that face. It supplies the obvious answer to the obvious conundrum of this election: why, given ”the fundamentals” — the historic unpopularity of the incumbent party and the tottering economy, which should make certain an opposition landslide — is the contest so close?
What differs here, and differs profoundly, is the unspoken centrality of race, the ancient sinful fulcrum of American politics. As Lyndon Johnson foresaw, the Democrats’s belated championing of the civil rights revolution of the mid-1960s, in moving the ”solid South” from Democrat to Republican hands, enabled the Republicans to dominate the White House for two generations. After 1968, Republicans won seven in 10 presidential elections. (Before it, Democrats had won seven of 10.)
It is no accident that the largest Âsingle polling disparity between McCain and Obama voters, apart from race itself, is age. Obama’s candidacy is in large part a rebellion of the young, for whom race has much less saliency, and one of the great indeterminacies of the election is how many young people will turn out to vote.
Another is whether the increase in those who will vote for Obama in part because of his race — most notably, African-Americans, who are registering in large numbers — will offset or exceed those who will vote against him in part for the same reason. This complex question turns at its heart on whether race can be used effectively as a kind of ”ignition switch” to make of Obama, for a critical subset of voters in a handful of critical states, a figure too culturally ”different” and ”foreign” and ”elite” to seem a plausible leader.
The potential is certainly there, for one sees persistent signs of it in everyday life. ”I could never vote for Obama” — I’ve heard variations of this line a great many times over the past few weeks, most recently from a waiter who noticed me paging through the newspaper’s political coverage. ”I could never vote for a Muslim,” he went on, smiling apologetically; and what struck me about the ensuing exchange was my inability to convince this man, whom I’ve known for years, that Obama is Christian — ”He only converted when he was 12,” he insisted.
This substratum of concern or discomfort about race, and complementary worries about Obama as a foreigner or outsider for whom a vote would thus become a perilous gamble, have provided a prime target for Republican political and media operatives. Whether McCain’s campaign will be able to exploit this discomfort turns on whether, among these several million critical voters, fear of an unfamiliar African-American ”elitist” can be made to overwhelm fear of an extension of Republican governance that few can now doubt has proved catastrophic for the country.
It is a truism that given the political ”fundamentals” — the anger at Bush, the fear of hard times, the disquiet over the country’s direction — the election this year should bring overwhelming Democratic victory. Perhaps, given the vast increases in voter registration and the shift in party identification, that is precisely what will happen.
But we are beyond models. It is the very unpopularity of Bush and the atmosphere of profound disillusion that helped produce a Democratic challenger whose election would constitute a true revolution. That this is so stems from the unspoken shame of American politics. That that shame might finally be overcome is perhaps the most precious promise of the ”politics of hope”. —