so Barack Obama will face Republican candidate John McCain this November in the contest for the White House. The confirmation has been a long-time coming but Obama has demonstrated both his statesmanship and his staying power in the face of the obdurate refusal over the last two months of his rival Hillary Clinton — once the Democrat front-runner — to accept that she was beaten.
Now we move to the presidential campaign proper and pundits are sizing up the two contestants. McCain is a wily and experienced politician. However, already it has been noted how he has failed since his own victory to take advantage of the Democrats internecine struggle by establishing an early presence in the competition. This has in part been explained by two organizational mess-ups in his campaign that have hampered its ability to get off the ground. He will need to do better because one of the characteristics of the Obama election machine has been its superb organization, high quality aides and advisers and its adroit exploitation of the Internet for the first time in a campaign for the White House.
Even though the Blundering Bush presidency has done much to discredit the Republican Party in the last eight years, Obama’s passage to the Oval Office is far from assured. But his victorious run for the nomination makes clear how he is going to appeal to American voters. Hillary Clinton seized the keyword “Change” from the Obama campaign and promised to change America. Obama, however, was already on a subtler track — he promised to change Americans. Just as that other iconic US politician John Kennedy told Americans to ask not what their country could do for them, but rather what they could do for their country, so Obama is challenging US voters to change for the better.
Such change will undoubtedly involve confronting the insularity that has characterized an electorate that believed itself divorced from the concerns of the rest of the world. Global climate change and 9/11 both exploded such comfortable introspection. Meanwhile, Bush’s military and foreign policy failures have underlined the impossibility of imposing Washington’s immature, half-formed worldview on everybody else, despite US wealth in gold and technology.
From the point of view of the Middle East, Obama looks to be good news. He is one of the few US politicians who always opposed the Iraq invasion, even in the few heady days after Saddam’s ouster when Bush’s policy appeared triumphant. He is committed to a phased withdrawal of US forces from Iraq but, more importantly, he is likely to start over with a clean sheet on the plight of the Palestinians. Therein lies his greatest political danger. If he is overexplicit in the degree to which he is prepared to require essential concessions from Israel, he will find the powerful US Zionist lobby against him and dyed-in-the-wool Democratic American Zionists will swing their support behind Republican neocons and their fundamentalist Christian right backers. Their power to disrupt and discredit is considerable and dangerous and Obama is surely already in their sights.
