Obama is a break from the past, but can he win the real battles to come?

Even some Republicans see an advantage when it comes to tackling the big foreign policy questions if the nation is led by someone who isn’t milky white, who didn’t grow up amid east coast privilege and who isn’t tainted by Iraq.

Bush is easily demonised; Obama isn’t

THERE is no doubting where the liberal media stands. With the front page photographs, glowing editorials and slightly breathless radio and TV commentaries, the “Irish for O’Bama” bandwagon has gained huge momentum since Barack’s sensational win in the Iowa caucus last week.

Black is the new female, right?

By the time you read this, chances are he will have defeated Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire and be the clear favourite for the Democratic nomination. He is, undoubtedly, big news. That he is black — or half black — makes his start all the more sensational.

A word of caution, though: another 48 states will have had their say before George Bush’s successor is inaugurated this time next year. Barack Hussein Obama has conquered one mountain — the perception that he is a lightweight — but there are several more between him and the Promised Land.

Hardcore Democrats clearly, overwhelmingly, want change which they don’t define as turning the clock back 16 years to Bill Clinton’s first term. Clintonian nostalgia is being bested by hope for “a new kind of politics”.

Hillary Clinton increasingly looks — and, more importantly, feels — old. Bringing people together is not her style, but it is Obama’s. Dirt-digging — the “fun bit” for Hillary — whether it’s about Barack’s kindergarten records, his Muslim upbringing or his drug use, itself looks dirty, panicky.

Whether Americans want Obama’s “change you can believe in” or just “change”, as offered by Hillary, depends on how bad they perceive things to be. Not that either version of “change” means changing any of the Democratic party’s core beliefs.

On the contrary, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Affirmative action, abortion rights, an ever-rising minimum wage, gun control, and the rightness of the state generally as the best means to ends, are not open to any serious discussion.

All the Democratic candidates have learnt the Clintonian trick of rhetorically reaching out to more middle American values — but the bottom lines don’t alter.

The Obama phenomenon is all the more remarkable when one considers that his voting record is considerably more liberal — left-wing in our parlance — than Hillary’s, and yet she comes across to many Americans as some sort of quasi-socialist ideologue while he occupies a position almost above politics.

If he does beat her for the Democratic nomination — and we will know the answer to that soon enough — Obama’s inexperience will be exposed time and again by the Republican party machine.

At this stage, though, the fact that he doesn’t appear to have been honed over a period of decades by a corporate communications team is what makes him so attractive, to certain voters at least.

Hillary’s problem — and it’s one she can do very little about — is that she suspects, probably rightly, that the American majority is not in the same place as herself and the Democratic party base.

A certain amount of deception, therefore, is called for. Less skilful Democrats like John Edwards, who is running third nationally, come across as plain deceptive. The more practised ones, like her, exhibit the “plasticity” and inauthenticity that plague her candidacy. Hillary is hiding her true feelings and it shows. Even when she’s on the verge of tears, it looks pre-planned.

So if the policy differences between the Democrats — on the domestic agenda, at least — are small, what is this “change” Obama seems to represent? Partly, it’s generational. Unlike the other candidates, he could take the US finally past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the baby boom generation that has sapped American politics for so long.

Obama, unlike Clinton, is anti-war: not in the Iraq sense of being anti-war — the troops are there to stay for years yet, whatever he might say at this stage.

Rather, Obama transcends the culture war, the American civil war that began in Vietnam about (in Marilyn Quayle’s words) — who demonstrated, who dropped out, who took drugs, who joined the sexual revolution and who dodged the draft — in a way that Hillary patently cannot.

Actually, for all the poison in US politics, the policy differences have narrowed, as they have in most sophisticated democracies. On healthcare, as on Iraq, all the candidates are in the same baseball ground. Abortion and gay rights provoke much sound and fury, but they are very largely in the hands of the states, not the federal government.

Many, many Americans would sincerely love an escape hatch from the politics of who — or whose wife — bakes cookies and who doesn’t? With Iran apparently progressing towards a nuclear capability and al-Qaida possibly on its way to turning Pakistan into the next Afghanistan, the culture wars look like a distraction.

As the only serious non-Baby Boomer in the race, Obama could be well placed to heal the old divides. Whether his answers — bombing Pakistan and talking to Iran’s President Ahmedinejad — are the right ones, though, is still debatable. At the same time, even some Republicans see some advantage for America when it comes to tackling the big foreign policy questions if the nation is led by someone who isn’t milky white, who didn’t grow up amid east coast privilege and who isn’t tainted by the Iraq war.

Bush is easily demonised; Obama isn’t.

NEVERTHELESS, hawkish types like John McCain and Rudy Giuliani can reasonably point out that 9/11 was planned well before George Bush arrived on the scene and being nicey-nicey around the world in the 1990s didn’t stop anti-westernism, incubating in the Islamic world. On the contrary, they went hand in hand.

Hillary Clinton still cannot quite be written off. She sounded bitter earlier this week, but she has enormous reserves of experience and cash. It might sound ungenerous coming from her, but Obama’s record in high office truly is sparse. His performances on the campaign trail veer from brilliant to boring.

And Hillary might be the product of a million focus groups but she has finallydeveloped an ability to smile and talk halfway naturally. Her refusal to disavow her vote for the Iraq war suggests at least a thin vein of principle.

The war can cut two ways too, of course: in times of crisis, people often rally to the candidate they feel they know, the safer option. Bluntly, Hillary, McCain and Giuliani all instil a deep sense of security: Obama excites, but that’s not the same as feeling safe.

Some on the American right — not least Karl Rove, Bush’s ex-brain — are hailing Barack Obama at this stage because their hatred of all things Clinton runs so deep.

Many Republicans assume that for all the ads they could run about Hillary Clinton’s on-off relationship with the truth, Obama will be mincemeat in November not because he’s black, but because he’s perceived as too liberal.

Yes, he’s a very strong candidate, but this race hasn’t been run yet, let alone won.