Starting over in America

It’s primary season in the US electoral calendar. It’s that time when fleece-wrapped and beanie-clad Americans gather in hysterical throngs in civic centres and town halls in the frozen wastes of New England and Iowa, waving placards with sloppy slogans in fonts subtly different from those of their opponents. Under an avalanche of focus-group rhetoric, a hopelessly undemocratic (to the rest of the world, anyway) process begins.

It starts earlier each time, and this one began almost a year ago when the candidates of both parties set up their mandatory “exploratory committees”. Then the media gossiped and speculated until the senators, governors and varied Washington bigshots announced their campaigns. Then begins a process of shameless pandering to Iowans on of parochial matters of ethanol subsidies and to the fiercely freethinking Granite Staters of New Hampshire (state motto: “Live Free or Die”), in order that the first-in-the-nation caucuses and primaries provide momentum to sweep through the states to come.

It’s easy to be cynical. To the rest of the world, the primary system demonstrates little other than the sad fact that a small sliver of the electorate wields massive, disproportionate influence – just like the electoral college system, which pretty much sends twenty-something states to the Democrats, twenty-something states to the Republicans, leaving a small handful of swing states to decide the next President. It renders laughable any democratic principle of ‘one person, one vote’.

This time – even by usual standards – the world is watching with fascination and some nerves. It’d be hard to argue that there’s ever been a more pivotal election, geopolitically speaking. The course of the war on terror, global approaches to climate change, US relations with the Muslim world and with China – the next President of the United States will be crucial in determining what transpires in the years to come. And we all have a stake in it. Can’t the Electoral College should be expanded; if Texas can have 34 votes and small flyover states where nobody wants to lives get a handful each, is it that unreasonable for Europe to get twenty, China to get a couple of dozen, and the Arab world to get a few – depending whether they stop burning American flag on al-Jazeera? I’ve made this argument to a variety of Americans over the years (and I even mischievously posted on a right-wing American blog a while back), and the responses have run the gamut from condescending bemusement to outright hostility. It’s an idea that’s going to take some time to get the traction it deserves.

But I don’t mean to sneer at the American system – for all its shortcomings, the rest of the world owes it a great deal. And this time, there’s something truly different going on. In part, because for the first time since horse and carriage, there’s no incumbent President or Vice-President running (can you imagine the global opprobrium if Cheney threw his hat into the ring?) In part, it’s due to the palpable disillusionment the US electorate has, not with the GOP per se, but with the neocon, evangelical cabal which has hijacked its agenda, and in so doing alienated and enraged everyone else. Michael Moore probably played a role in why things are different this time too. His 2007 documentary, “Sicko”, brought real attention to the criminal unfairness of the for-profit health system in the US, which not merely has 47 million Americans uninsured, but leaves even those who do have insurance to get helplessly screwed by the HMOs who are beholden to “Big Pharma” and its Washington lobby.

And in part, it’s because on the Democratic side, there’s a man who comes along once in a generation. Obviously, nobody knows if Barack Hussein Obama will be the nominee. And if he is, nobody knows if he’ll win in the general election. What an improbable tale if he does – and I do hope he will. Nevertheless, what I’m sure of, from watching him since 2004 and his magnificent speech to the Democratic National Convention (http://youtube.com/watch?v=MNCLomrqIN8) is that he reminds people of JFK, RFK and Martin Luther King for a reason.

What’s that reason? It’s not a conniving media strategy to position himself as their natural successor. Nor do I think he’s received politically correct favouritism by a mainstream media afraid to criticise the first black man with a chance of winning. I’m sure of what it is, and anyone who has seen him speak, seen him on the talk shows, read his books, and heard him captivate his audience must know it too. Even Republicans must know it. They must fear the exquisitely all-American story of the son of a Kenyan father, brought up by his Kansan mother in Indonesia and Hawaii who, upon leaving law school, doesn’t go to a lucrative corporate law firm to pull in a six-figure salary. Instead, he works the streets on the south side of Chicago with community empowerment programs. He works as a civil rights lawyer, and becomes first a senator in the Illinois state legislature and is then elected in a landside to the US Senate. Amidst massive encouragement and support and almost religious faith – especially from young voters utterly disgusted with the cronyism, falsehood and partisanship of the political system in Washington – he launches his presidential bid. The rest will be history – in every sense. The Republicans must surely fear the reason behind Obamamania: he reminds people of those giants from the sixties.

If the overused term ‘inspirational’ can be applied to anything, surely it can to Obama. He speaks in rhetoric without sounding stage-managed. He rouses a crowd with metre and cadence and does it neither notes nor a prompter. He engages without being obsequious or disingenuous. He’s qualified, naturally funny and just plain likeable in a way that Hillary Clinton – for all her very real qualities – will never be. But above all, there’s something transcendent – even ethereal – about his message, about the platform for his campaign. His speech back in 2004 referred to “the audacity of hope” – also the title of his second book. It advocated a future of nonpartisanship, of the restoration of American moral leadership in the world, of using progressive domestic policies to lead by example. From everyone in the States I speak to, from all that I read and watch, it’s abundantly clear: something over there is changing in a very real way. Seven years of President Numbnuts and his coterie of Machiavellian, base-pandering divisivists have alienated a great swathe of the electorate. For some under thirty – baby boomers’ children – their parents’ generation has bequeathed them a world and a country they no longer admire. It was their parents who began the era of rampant consumerism which will be inscribed on the twentieth century’s tombstone. It was they who failed to understand environmental problems and who now are the captains of industry who continue to obstruct real progress against climate change. And in this election year, it’s they who the younger generation see in congress and lined up behind the podiums in the election debates. Old white men, all in a row, railing against Hispanic immigrants, baiting the Iranians, parsing words on climate change, speaking in well-honed soundbytes, and hedging positions to remain friendly to the military-industrial complex and the lobbies which control contemporary DC.

On the Republican side, Congressman Ron Paul from Texas is the only one with the courage to speak unpopular truths. Despite being frighteningly conservative on many issues (his proposals for the abolition of the Inland Revenue Service and the CIA alone render him utterly unelectable – and a good thing too), he stated in a recent debate that in order to understand the hostility aimed at the US by the Muslim world, “[Americans] must examine [their] foreign policy”. He believes it’s US support for Arab dictatorships, the Iraq war, an apparently unwavering favouritism towards Israel, and the presence of US troops on Muslim holy lands which are the underlying causes of anti-Americanism in the Middle East. Not only did his opponents openly sneer, but one of them demanded he retract such an unpatriotic position. “They hate us because of our freedom”, was the predictable populist retort.

Two things deserve mention here. The first is that Ron Paul has been a phenomenon in 2007. Despite never polling out of single digits in any of the early primary states, he raised $20 million in the final quarter of 2007 – practically the leader among the GOP candidates – and not only did it practically all come over the internet, but it practically all came from 18-25 year olds. In other words, a fiscally conservative, elderly and rather wooden congressman from Texas, whose views on a variety of issues are totally at odds with the mainstream and who must be considered unelectable by even his most fervently dewy-eyed supporter, has tapped into a great lake of discontent among the youth, and raised more money than the establishment candidates. He was against the Iraq war from the start, he bemoans US hegemony, he spoke out against US dependence on foreign oil long before his competitors. He has – at every opportunity – said exactly what he thinks. So much so that Bill Maher – the famously left-wing, anti-GOP, libertarian comic and late-night commentator – after interviewing Congressman Paul for the first time early in 2007, was visibly stunned by the honesty of Paul’s arguments (http://youtube.com/watch?v=xo6KiusCBoU) and came pretty close to endorsing him.

Many Paul supporters – who stomp noisily around YouTube and the blogosphere with vituperative advocacy for their man – will likely coalesce behind Obama when Paul drops out of the race – as he inevitably will. In other words, the most right-wing and reactionary candidate from either party, a white, old southerner, shares more with a centre-left, young, black, progressive northerner than with anyone else from either party. And young voters – who are participating in historically unprecedented numbers – overwhelmingly support them both. What does this tell you about the exasperation the American youth is feeling towards the status quo?

The second thing deserving mention is that Paul is very right as well as very Right. What he argued in the debate on the role of US foreign policy in fermenting terrorism – and with which his army of devoted, web-savvy supporters must presumably concur, is conventional wisdom everywhere else in the world. Read the opinion pages of any British, French, Dutch, Indian, South-east Asian, Australian broadsheet – anywhere on the spectrum – and you find some attribution of blame at US foreign policy blunders and Washington’s calculated support for the undemocratic regimes in the Arab world. Until recently heresy in the US – outside of blogs and the New York Times Op-Ed page, the young are starting to realise this, while the old still do not. A seachange, in other words, is afoot.

Ron Paul won’t win of course – and it’s a good thing too. He’s a lunatic on most issues. Another Bush term would do less damage than a President Paul. He won’t win. But neither will the paleorepublicans who laugh him down on the debate stage. The policies of polarising the electorate on social wedge issues like abortion and gay marriage, and dismissing criticism of the administration as unpatriotic – has manifestly failed. It’s left the next generation of voters – sorry for the cliché – hungry for change. A full seventy percent of Americans believe their country is on the wrong track. Merrill Lynch this week announced that the US economy may be in recession. The most accurate civilian body count of the Iraq War so far puts the figure at 151,000. And the current Commander-in-Chief has made, after seven years, his first – first – trip to the Occupied Territories, and while there, in his usual, embarrassingly platitudinous double-speak, informed the Arab world there should be peace in Palestine. As if he’s just discovered it.

Thing must change across the pond, and the unprecedented turnout in the primaries and caucuses so far demonstrates how fierce that demand for change is. And the improbable candidacy of Senator Obama – with its refusal to “go negative”, with his soaring, preacher-like oratory, his warmth and his determination, his words infused with both moral anger with how things have gone so wrong and real optimism at how they can be put right – may be remembered by future historians as the first real sign of America’s renaissance. Once more a ‘City on a Hill’, as John Winthrop described America.

I’m as frustrated with the Bush Administration as anyone around the world. Each time I visit the States, I’m increasingly struck by the sense of fear drummed up by the news media, the perfidious advertising, the divisive rhetoric spewed forth by the elected officials – many of whom have a vested interest in the maintenance of this sense of national foreboding. A close friend lives and works in DC. “This country needs a big hug”, he’s probably said to me a dozen times, as we sit on his porch near Georgetown drinking a beer. It’s a little cheesy, a little corny perhaps – but I’ve never heard it put more accurately. America needs to feel good about itself again. The world needs America to feel good about itself again. From the Declaration of Independence to the Marshall Plan to the Apollo program, America has been a beacon to light the world. It’s just been so long since that were the case, and become a claim so cynically abused by the Bush administration, we’ve all overlooked that it can and should be true once more.

The more my friend has said it – that America just really needs a hug – the more I realise he’s not trying to convince me. Rather, he’s mumbling in quiet desperation for something to come along and allow the country to start this wretched century again. The installation by the judiciary of the puppet President and his cabal of reactionaries in a disputed election, 9/11, the disastrous and unaffordable tax cuts for the über-wealthy, the war in Iraq, the criminal mismanagement of Katrina: it all got the twenty-first century in America off to a beginning that the majority of its citizens feel has been a nightmare. The last time my friend said that sentence to me was over a year ago, when to most Americans Obama was just some word that sounded a lot like Osama. Things are very different now, and the Barack Obama juggernaut, with its message of hope and positivism and engagement – win or lose – will change America for the better. But especially so if he wins, and the world is waiting patiently.