Letter From America
Barack Obama pulling away
THE latest Newsweek poll has Barack Obama leading John McCain by fifteen points (51% to 36%) in the presidential race. A month ago, in the same poll, the two presumptive presidential nominees were tied at 46%. Either this is the bounce the pundits were predicting after Obama clinched the nomination, or this poll is an outlier.
Even if the numbers truly reflect popular will, the Obama campaign ought not to be celebrating. Michael Dukakis had a similar lead at this stage of the campaign in 1988, and went on to lose the election to the then vice-president, George Herbert Walker Bush, rather badly.
Republicans ought not to be hopeful either. Barack Obama is a far better candidate than Michael Dukakis ever was. Besides, the senior Bush was running to continue the policies of an immensely popular two-term president, Ronald Reagan.
John McCain is running for the third term of an extremely unpopular two-term president, the junior Bush, whose approval ratings are in the mid twenties. To give an example of how bad things are for Bush, when his chopper landed at a destination today, he waved at the only two people around, twice, and they never waved back!
The Obama people are determined not to repeat Dukakis's mistakes. Instead of letting the Republicans define Obama negatively, Obama is defining himself positively. Starting June 20, the Obama campaign is running a 1-minute infomercial on Obama in 18 states.
To neutralise Republican innuendo that he is not patriotic enough, Obama appears in the commercial, appropriately entitled, "The country I love," wearing a flag-pin and making patriotic pronouncements.
To show his mainstream American roots, the ad starts with a photograph of Obama's white mother, Ann Dunham, holding Obama as a toddler. Another photograph shows a young Obama, sitting between his white grandparents, who brought him up and instilled mainstream "Kansas values" in him.
The script of the ad reads: "I am Barack Obama. America is a country of strong families and strong values. My life's been blessed with both. I was raised by a single mom and my grandparents. We didn't have much money, but they taught me values straight from the Kansas heartland where they grew up.
"Accountability and self-reliance. Love of country. Working hard without making excuses. Treating your neighbours as you would like to be treated. It's what guided me as I worked by way up -- taking jobs and loans to make it through college.
"It's what led me to pass up Wall Street jobs and go to Chicago instead, helping neighbourhoods devastated when steel plants closed. That's why I passed laws moving people from welfare to work, cut taxes for working families, and extended healthcare for wounded troops who'd been neglected.
"I approved this message because I'll never forget those values, and if I have the honour of taking the oath of office as president, it will be with a deep and abiding faith in the country I love."
So far things appear to be going well for Obama. Hillary Clinton is going to make her first campaign appearance with Obama on June 27. Most Hillary supporters, including an overwhelming majority of white women, have unified under the Obama banner. The latest polls in the three swing states show Obama beating McCain in all three -- in Pennsylvania by 12%, in Ohio by 6% and in Florida by 4%.
Still, Obama can ill afford to be complacent. The Republicans and the rightwing 527s are scheming and plotting. Women voters have noted wryly that while Hillary Clinton had projected herself as a man, someone who wants to fight, Obama's campaign was all about pacifism -- stopping fighting, empathy, sensitivity and making compromises -- supposedly all women's virtues!
Obama was raised by a "strong" mother (and a "strong" grandmother), bolstered by a "strong" sister, married to a "strong" wife, and (is) proud of his "strong" daughters." Says Megan Beyer, a charter member of Women for Obama: "In many ways, he really will be the first woman president."
One potential line of Republican attack will be that Obama is not masculine enough for the job. Anti-Obama websites have called him "effeminate." Republican surrogates have labeled Obama "hysterical," the same word Michael Corleone uses in Godfather to describe his grief-stricken sister, Connie, after she finds out that her brother had her husband executed! Obama has also been referred to in feminine terms as a "wuss," "prissy" and "sissy boy" by Republican hacks.
Republicans are the masters of negative campaign. But, they are not sure how far they can go attacking a black candidate before eliciting white backlash. That is why they had literally campaigned for Hillary Clinton, for whom they have been preparing for four years and have the perfect playbook.
Currently, the Republicans are despondent. Their party's presumptive nominee, the aging John McCain, does not excite them. While they have successfully played the race card against white opponents like Michael Dukakis, (for example through the infamous "Willie Horton" ad in 1988) they realise that doing so, even subtly, against Obama can be suicidal. There is a perception among the Republicans that Obama does not hate them. Obama does not even hate President Bush. Consequently, Republicans find it difficult to hate him. What are the poor Republicans to do come November?
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