Clinton and Obama likely to end up at the mercy of party powerbrokers

MANY people have been comparing Barack Obama with John F Kennedy, and they are also comparing his wife, Michelle, with Jackie Kennedy.

Both Jack and Barack were Harvard educated, but the big parallel is that Obama is trying to become the first black president, whereas Kennedy was the first Roman Catholic elected to the White House.

Whatever happens, it looks like it will be a first for the Democratic party this year because it will be the first major party to nominate either a black or a woman for president. This adds an incalculable factor to analysing what is likely to happen.

Kennedy was not the first Catholic to be nominated by a major party. That distinction went to Al Smith in 1928 when they figuratively came out of the grave to vote against him.

I remember election day in 1960 because it was a school day and I used to have lunch at my grandmother’s house, which was just a stone’s throw from the school in Tralee. She had recently returned from the United States after almost half a century. She had been active in the Republican party for 20 years.

She talked that day about her vote in 1948. She had been working for the Republicans, but became disillusioned at the lacklustre campaign run by the party’s candidate, Governor Thomas E Dewey of New York. Public opinion polls had him so far ahead that sampling was discontinued weeks before the election.

President Harry Truman, who had taken over following the death of Franklin D Roosevelt in 1945, was running against Dewey and two other Democrats on third and fourth party tickets.

Former Vice-President Henry Wallace was running for the Progressive Party and Governor Strom Thurmond for the southern Democrats, or Dixiecrats as they called themselves.

With the Democrats split three ways, the pundits wrote off Truman’s chances, but he barnstormed the country. Feeling that he did not deserve to be humiliated, my grandmother said she gave him a sympathy vote in the privacy of the polling booth and was mad for years afterwards when he won.

In 1960 she admitted she would have been in a quandary about how to vote if she were still in the US. She had more reason than most to remember the election of 1928. Her husband, my grandfather, was at home dying of TB, and, as it turned out, it was his dying wish that she should go vote for Al Smith. When she got home, her husband was dead. She would probably have voted for Jack Kennedy to offset the vote of one of the bigots who was voting against him just because he was Catholic. Similar considerations have undoubtedly been influencing the votes of black people and women in the US this year.

Although a white southerner, Bill Clinton, always enjoyed the support of the overwhelming majority of black people, it is ironic therefore that his wife has been faring dismally with black voters.

Of course, they are not voting against Hillary. The overwhelming majority are supporting Barack Obama, one of their own. This has tended to distort the American election picture.

In South Carolina, for instance, 30% of the population is black, but less than half of the electorate there vote Democratic. Since nearly all of the blacks are Democrats, it means that as much as 60% of the party supporters are black.

The majority of people who voted in the Democratic primary this year were indeed black and Obama won 80% of them, so he was always going to come out on top there.

In Maryland where the racial profile was comparatively similar, he won almost 90% of the black vote.

Watching the early primary returns during the week, it seemed the American networks were ready to write off Hillary Clinton. She had to win in both Texas and Ohio even to remain in the race according to the pundits. One network suggested she had to win well in both of those states, or she was finished anyway.

Obama had been doing phenomenally well among Democrats in states that are likely to vote Republican in November. Thanks to rules introduced by George McGovern back in the early 1970s, the Democrats elect delegates for each state in the primaries in proportion with the votes each candidate gets, while in the presidential election each state is winner-take-all.

McGovern won the Democratic nomination in 1972, but he proceeded to lose 49 of the 50 states to Richard Nixon in the actual election. Yet the Democrats still retain the McGovern rules.

In the primaries so far Obama has won 24 states which will have a total of 184 electoral votes in the presidential election, whereas Clinton has only 14 states but those have a total of 226 electoral votes. Under the presidential system, she would now be leading the race, but he looks like going to the Democratic national convention with more delegates than her. Neither is likely to have enough support to win the nomination, so the superdelegates will effectively decide the outcome.

Those will be people like congressmen, senators, and state office-holders within the party, as well as appointees of Democratic governors. They are likely to vote with their heads rather than their hearts in selecting the candidate they think will have the best chance of winning in November.

Democrats have been out of the White House for eight years and it could be a further eight if they fail in November, so this should concentrate their minds.

The Democratic convention is going to be held the week before the Republican get-together. If Obama wins the nomination, the person he picks as his running mate is likely to be anybody’s guess.

HILLARY Clinton is unlikely to be interested in waiting around as vice-president to run again in 2016 when she would be 69. On the other hand, if she wins the nomination, she will probably pick Obama as her running mate. She is already hinting at this, and the choice would probably unite the convention.

Obama’s performance in the primaries would suggest that blacks are finally voting in very significant numbers. The Republicans are the party of Abraham Lincoln, and George W Bush has appointed two black people — Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice — as secretary of state. Hence the Democrats can no longer take black voters for granted. Obama has been calling for “change” as if the word were a kind of mantra. History will probably look back on this as a time of great political change, and not just because Bush is being replaced.

Ian Paisley announced this week that he will be stepping down as First Minister of the Northern Assembly in May. He has been a force in Northern politics for more than 40 years.

Change has been a global phenomenon in the past year. Nicholas Sarkozy took over as president of France after 12 years of Jacques Chirac, while Gordon Brown replaced Tony Blair after more than 10 years in power in Britain, and Kevin Rudd took over as prime minister of Australia from John Howard, who was thrown out after more than 11 years. Dmitry Medvedez has already been “elected” president in Russia after eight years of Vladimir Putin.

Bertie Ahern has been Taoiseach for more than 10 years. Could there be a change here, too?