US presidential election - Obama and McCain on the last lap

AS ONE great spectacle closed yesterday another moved inexorably towards its climax in November.

One four-year cycle concluded in Beijing, but the battle to lead another very different cycle of the same duration took on a new, sharpened impetus.

That the nomination of Delaware Senator Joseph Biden as America’s Democratic vice-presidential candidate, and the opening of the final and decisive battles in America’s presidential election campaign, may be less significant than the closing ceremony of the Olympics is just one more indication of the new, powerful place China has come to occupy in the world.

On Saturday Barack Obama declared Senator Biden as his choice for vice-president. The selection of Mr Biden, 65, shows that Mr Obama accepts that voters need considerable reassurance before they would consider sending him to the Oval Office.

As chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, mr Biden has the experience to play the role of older and wise counsellor to Mr Obama who, at 47, is nearly 20 years younger than Mr Biden. He also has the ability to take the fight to John McCain over the war in Iraq and the battle against terrorism.

In a choreographed announcement just a week before the Democratic national convention in Denver, Colorado next Monday — the first in Denver in 100 years — Mr Obama put the final nail in Hillary Clinton’s coffin, ending any speculation, no matter how fantastic, that he might consider her, his strongest rival in the Democratic Party, as his running mate.

It was always far-fetched and unrealistic to imagine that Mr Obama might consider Senator Clinton as his partner. She is too closely associated with an ever-more distant past, and the potential for conflict represented by Bill Clinton is too great a risk for a candidate already battling to make history.

Indeed, we saw vicious outbursts from the former president during the campaign when his fabled temper got the better of him; when the testosterone burst through the usual and all-conquering charm.

In any event it is not certain that a person as forceful, as ambitious, as Mrs Clinton would be satisfied in a role that is at best subsidiary and until relatively recently all but irrelevant. America’s first vice-president, John Adams, described his role as “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived”.

And history has shown he was right. When Harry S Truman succeeded Franklin D Roosevelt, who died months after beginning his fourth term, in April 1945, he knew nothing about the atomic bomb, the use of which he authorised four months later.

When Dwight D Eisenhower was asked what important decisions his vice-president had taken part in, he replied: “If you give me a week, I might think of one.”

The office is no longer so marginalised and whomever fills it their immediate task will be to bolster their candidate’s campaign.

Mr McCain holds a 2-1 lead over Mr Obama on world affairs and as better suited to be commander-in-chief, according to an ABC News-Washington Post poll released yesterday. The same poll, which gave Mr Obama a slight 49% to 43% lead, found that three-quarters said naming Mr Biden as Mr Obama’s running mate would make no difference in their vote. Mr Obama probably hoped for a more positive response.

As of now the race for the White House in early November remains wide open.