A wake up call for Obama’s re-election

WE didn’t get off to a good start, me and the man from Hawaii.

Nearly four years ago to the day, Barack Obama’s campaign impressed on me that I needed to upgrade my TV. Prior to that, the basic analogue package had sufficed for the needs of my home.

But the American presidential election night was round the corner. An historic occasion was in prospect. And the only real way to get with the programme was to tune into the American news channels that are available on Sky and UPC.

So I took the plunge, made the call, and had the man visit the house. It was all set up and ready to go on the Tuesday. That evening found me out at work, covering a public meeting in a draughty hotel room, reminding me that twas far from the bright lights of US presidential elections I was reared.

It was the far side of ten o’clock when I made it back. Within five minutes, my world began to crumble. Snow was all the TV offered. Snow and more snow. I fiddled, pressed buttons, unplugged and replugged, even resorted to a firm belt to the box with the heel of my hand. There was no shifting the snow. No cable channels would be beaming into my home that night. And so history was made without me. By the time Obama got elected, I had fallen into a fitful sleep. We got off to a bad start.

Most people had a different take on his election. It promised a new dawn. His ethnicity, his flowing rhetoric, his backstory, the jaded aftertaste of Bush’s disastrous impact, all augured well for the new guy. Here was the change that large swathes of the world were looking for.

Many now say that Obama has been a disappointment. It’s difficult to argue with that conclusion. The US economy is in the doldrums, and the rest of the world stands and waits for it to lift off. The president inherited much of the problems associated with the economy, but he hasn’t managed to seriously tackle the malaise.

There have not been the realignments that his campaign promised. American society is still dominated by wealth and power. Wall Street has had a great recession, most of its personnel having returned to the kind of earnings they enjoyed when they were driving the financial system onto the rocks.

Still, he has made some inroads. His healthcare plan is inclusive and hints at the kind of society he waxed lyrical about when campaigning four years ago. He has brought some stability to the economic woe, and recent indicators suggest that a tentative recovery is on the way. Abroad, America is no longer hated in corners of the world which had turned against it under Bush.

In any event, apart from cleaning up after the clown who went before him, Obama has had to face a task none of his predecessors were ever lumbered with. In economic terms, and by extension in terms of power, America is in decline. The rise of the Asian powerhouses, led by China, is ensuring that this century will be Asian, just as the last one was American. Feeling its way in this new world is a hugely difficult task, particularly when so many Americans refuse to believe the new dispensation that is unfolding.

Against all that, Obama is doing well to be on the cusp of re-election. He may not win next Tuesday — and my TV, by the way, is going a bomb these days so I’ll be tuned in — but if he loses, it will be by a whisker.

He is hated by the increasingly polarised heartland of the Republican party. The party has drifted further to the right over the last decade. They have no warmth for their own candidate. Romney is regarded as a flip flopper, who is dodgy on the holy trinity of the American right, Guns, God and gays. These days, the party is to a large extent made up of whites, at a time when the country has never been as racially mixed. They will vote for Romney simply because he is not Obama.

And Obama in turn campaigned for much of this election on the basis that he wasn’t Romney. The strategy appeared to work until the first presidential debate.

For possibly the first time in US history, a televised debate can be described as having had a decisive impact on the outcome. The first ever debate in 1960 has gone down as being crucial in seeing off the challenge of Richard Nixon, when he was up against John F Kennedy. Nixon was wearing a five o’clock shadow. He looked tired and aged. But whether or not his appearance had a major impact on the outcome was never tied down definitively.

There have been gaffs in other debates, killer lines in a few, but none had the impact of what unfolded in Denver on Octr 4. Obama had been cruising prior to that night. His strategy of portraying Romney as a rich guy whose primary interest was in defending the rich, had gone well. In Ohio, seen as the crucial state in this poll, Obama was leading by ten percentage points.

Then he went and spoiled it all by giving a performance that would hardly pass muster as a coherent bar-room argument at last orders.

Romney took full advantage. He came across as a reasonable sort, a no-nonsense type of guy who would be a competent manager of the economy. It was also his first opportunity to present himself in this light to a huge audience, and he grabbed the chance, scooting off to victory as Obama mumbled and waffled. If Romney wins that night will be regarded as the turning point.

The other interesting aspect to the campaign has been the relegation of the cultural issues that dominated other campaigns. One of the major political achievements of the Republican party over the last two decades has been its ability to get voters to vote against their economic interests. The white working class vote in particular has been a major element of the coalition of voters that the party has long relied on. Yet the economic policies of the party have largely been focused on cutting services and providing tax cuts for the rich, which, the policy suggests, then leads to a trickle down effect through society.

Most voters didn’t benefit from these policies, but went along with the Republicans on the basis of the party’s stance on cultural issues.

The strategy worked particularly well under Bush, when Karl Rove — who was known as Bush’s brain — drew together all these disparate elements to form a grand coalition.

This time around the cultural issues have faded somewhat. A New York Times poll in the crucial state of Ohio last week showed that Obama and Romney are running neck and neck among males who don’t have a college degree.

I hope Obama wins on Tuesday. He was handed a hospital pass by his predecessor and he deserves another shot. If Romney wins, it will be a sign that America wants to go back to a past that no longer exists, simply because it can’t bear to face the future.