Obama reaps a bumper harvest at home, but EU isn’t ripe for him yet

IN politics, it is better to be lucky than to be good. Barack Obama ran a smart, disciplined, well-funded campaign.

He also turned conventional Democratic political wisdom on its head by running a 50-state campaign rather than focusing simply on core urban states. But he was the beneficiary of plain old good luck, too.

The backdrop to the 2008 presidential campaign was especially fortunate. The drawn-out war in Iraq where the exit strategy is still not fully formed certainly helped.

An unpopular Republican president who had lost control of Congress was a big factor, too, as was a sluggish economy sliding towards recession.

The general mood of anti-incumbency did Obama no harm either.

All of this would have been good news for any Democratic candidate running for president in 2008, but it still doesn’t explain the scale of his victory.

Bluntly, John McCain lost as much as Barack Obama won. The Republican nominee made critical mistakes.

Those instinctively repelled by Sarah Palin’s strongly conservative views would like to see the relatively unknown governor of Alaska shoulder all the blame.

Her stances and inexperience certainly antagonised a large percentage of independent voters whom McCain needed to win. But it’s too simplistic an explanation: no previous vice-presidential pick has accounted for a 3.5% swing from one party to another.

Rather, the economic meltdown which engulfed America’s largest banks — and, specifically, the Bush administration’s response to it — split the Republican party faithful, blunting the McCain campaign’s momentum and shifting the media focus from security and foreign affairs to economics.

McCain was his own worst enemy, too. His campaign lacked a clear narrative. Was he a patriot or a maverick? Or, as seemed to be increasingly the case after the crash, was he a mere Bush cypher with nothing original to say?

He never cemented in voters’ minds who he really was or what kind of president he would be. In the end, concerns about Obama’s inexperience and his liberal positions during his short time in the US Senate were washed away by the Democratic tide and a torrent of bad decisions by the McCain camp.

Obama reaped a truly national harvest winning a host of states that went with Bush in 2004, including Ohio, Florida, Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado.

Women, young people, minorities and first-time voters flocked to him. That he carried 95% of the African-American vote — and scored poorly among white men — was to be expected. The revelation was that he took two-thirds of the Latino vote, suggesting they voted on class lines rather than being motivated by racial antagonisms.

Obama’s appeal to minority voters also helped propel Democrats into office in states which have not been fertile territory for years, such as Alabama and Virginia where incumbent Republicans were heavily defeated.

Aside from the loss of seats, the impact on the Republican party is stark.

A number of those who lost their seats, especially in the House of Representatives, were moderate Republicans. Those who were returned tend to put ideology before pragmatism.

Just as the average Democratic congressman is more conservative than the national leadership, so too are the Republicans. This will make for plenty of in-fighting, but don’t expect very many Republicans to heed McCain’s call to work with President Obama.

The change in the White House will be in terms of substance as well as style.

Domestically, the emphasis will be on regulation and increasing governmental oversight of the economy and shifting energy policy to balance oil, coal and gas with renewable sources.

The latter will almost certainly face strong opposition in Congress — and not just from Republicans — from those in seats where jobs depend on “dirty” fuels. As for healthcare reform, that might have to await an economic upturn: Obama’s plan is probably unaffordable at present.

Of more interest — and possible concern — to us will be change in the realm of American foreign policy. If multilateralism is to be the new watchword, perhaps with vice-president-elect Joe Biden leading the way, that will be welcomed broadly in Ireland and in Europe generally. Things get tougher, though, when it comes to the nitty-gritty.

A key political conundrum for Obama will be ordering the issues he tackles. Had McCain been elected, the strongly Democratic Congress would have challenged his policies and priorities from day one, leading to stalemate.

Obama will avoid that fate, but he will still face battles, although the breadth of his national victory will enable him to stand up to some of the special interest groups who helped elect him.

Instead, Obama’s problem is that he seeks to fight on so many fronts. His top-line foreign policy priorities are securing nuclear weapons arsenals around the world to prevent them falling into rogue hands, renewing American diplomacy and pursuing negotiations with Iran. But a number of other themes emerged during the campaign, from finding a way out of Iraq without leaving behind a failed state to the Arab-Israeli issue to the Darfur genocide to engagement with China.

Obama might intend a genuine break from the Bush administration’s practice of declarative policy, but initiatives to form a genuine consensus with Europe will still be hard. Europe increasingly has its own way of seeing things and the goals, if not the methods, of US policy have not changed that much.

If the EU thinks everything in the garden will suddenly be rosy come inauguration day, it is in for a shock. For one thing, it will not be able to use Bush as an excuse for inaction.

OBAMA will push hard for greater European participation in addressing the world’s problems, not least in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where Ireland doesn’t have a role, but also in relation to Russia where it is a diplomatic player through the EU. Obama hopes the Kremlin will no longer be able to divide the US and Europe. We shall see.

An even harder nut to crack is Iran. The roads to Moscow and Jerusalem run through Tehran.

Obama believes direct presidential diplomacy with Iran, offering trade inducements and normal diplomatic relations in return for the Iranians abandoning their nuclear programme and support for terrorism, will be too good a deal for the ayatollahs to turn down.

But what if they do just that? Obama threatens more economic isolation, but is Europe in the same place? The evidence to date is that it is not.

Obama’s foreign policy agenda then is an ambitious one — far more than Bush’s was in 2000. The unpalatable truth, though, is that Europe has no appetite for sticks, only carrots. He will never be as popular in Europe as he is today. He needs to hit the ground running if he is to achieve even half of his goals.