Poetry vs. fear

The Obama-McCain contest will hold up a mirror to America's soul.

By Gary Kamiya

Read more: Republican Party, George W. Bush, Democratic Party, Racial Issues, Hillary Rodham Clinton, John McCain, Race, Gary Kamiya, Opinion, Barack Obama, 2008 election

May 13, 2008 | The coming presidential election will present America with the starkest political choice it has faced in a generation. On one side, we have Barack Obama -- the first black candidate to make it to the finals, a staunch liberal who opposes the Bush administration's Iraq war and its massive giveaway to the rich. On the other, we have John McCain, a onetime maverick who expeditiously crawled back into the far-right bosom of the GOP and is running as Son of Bush.

It's the collision of an irresistible force with an immovable object. Obama, combined with Bush's disastrous legacy, is the irresistible force. Obama is a consummately skilled and pragmatic politician who has inspired millions of young voters, owns the black vote, and has demonstrated he can appeal to independents and swing voters outside the traditional Democratic constituency. Forget the recent polls showing that some Hillary Clinton supporters won't vote for him -- once Clinton gracefully bows out of the race, her supporters will close ranks around Obama. Anyone who seriously thinks a significant number of them are going to vote for McCain is delusional. The Democrats will go into November united and energized.

And, of course, they will benefit enormously from the train-wreck presidency of George W. Bush. According to a CNN poll, Bush is the most unpopular president in modern American history: a staggering 71 percent of Americans disapprove of how he is handling the job, the first time any president's disapproval rating has reached into the 70s. Support for Bush's signature achievement, the war in Iraq, is also at an all-time low, with 68 percent opposed to it. Things are no better for the Republicans on the domestic front, with voters battered by record-high gas prices and a tanking economy. On the issues, there is simply no ray of hope anywhere for the GOP.

But the GOP does have one immense, immovable object on its side: tradition. McCain may be the second coming of Bush, but he's familiar. He's white, he's white-haired, he talks tough on national security, and he regurgitates all the time-tested GOP sound bites about liberal wimps, ineffectual do-gooders, tax cuts for hard-working Americans, keeping big government off our backs, family values, the greatness of America, and so on. In short, he's an assembly-line Karl Rove Republican, retooled to make him more attractive to the party's troglodytic base. And assembly-line Republicans have tended to beat Democrats in recent elections.

Moreover, McCain isn't running against just any Democrat but against a black liberal named Barack Hussein Obama. Obama's name may be the most potent weapon in the GOP's armory. If you want to believe that America is a governable country of informed citizens and not a nation of ignorant, Fox News-watching sheep, the single most depressing fact to come out of the Bush years is that vast numbers of Americans continue to believe that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks. According to a 2003 Washington Post poll, nearly 70 percent of Americans believed that. And in a poll taken last September, 33 percent of Americans still believed it -- presumably the same 30-odd percent of Americans who will vote for a Republican even if he is running on a platform of sacrificing all the nation's firstborn children to Beelzebub.

Call it the Dumbshit Factor, the Nobody Home Problem, the Absentee Ballots from Mars Issue. Whatever you call it, it's the Republicans' built-in advantage this fall. If you're not in the "reality-based community" infamously derided by a senior Bush official, then you won't care if Iraq is a quagmire and the Middle East is a powder keg and the country is falling apart and the economy is on the verge of a depression and gas is $4.30 a gallon. You won't care because you won't know, or if you know you'll blame it all on liberals, feminazis, evil bureaucrats and gays. As you watch Fox News from your Barcalounger orbiting somewhere beyond the confines of space, time and logic, you will vote for the old white guy with the Anglo-Saxon name, not a Muslim terrorist sympathizer who helped his cousin attack America.

But the outer-space contingent only represents about a quarter of voters, a figure easily balanced out by yellow-dog Democrats, whose numbers have been swollen by hordes of young Obama fans. The real fight, as everyone knows, is over the remaining voters in crucial states like Ohio and Florida -- the independents, the swing voters, the blue-collar Catholics, the less-educated working class, the older women, the NASCAR dads, the suburban moms. The people that Clinton, who has been courting them so assiduously she is in danger of growing a sympathetic beer belly, notoriously called "hardworking Americans, white Americans."

It comes down to whether these "hardworking white Americans" want more of the same. Because Obama is black, liberal and doesn't come across as one of them, the conventional wisdom holds that they will vote for McCain, who boasts an even paler pigmentation than Bush's. Obama's failure to win over blue-collar Democrats, highlighted in recent primaries, has raised questions about whether he will fail in the general election to win over independents and swing voters, who share many qualities with moderate Democrats.

The overriding question here is simple: Who are we? This election represents a giant mirror, a chance to find out who we are as a people. The issue is whether America is still the scared, reactionary, sclerotic, profoundly creaky nation that it has been for the last eight years, or whether it's ready to shrug off the Bush era and begin anew. It comes down to whether America is old or young.

I'm betting on youth.

There are times when people cling to the familiar, even when it's not in their interest to do so. That happened in 2004, when the American people sized up Bush and decided they liked him more than John Kerry. Those pessimistic about Obama's chances cite this election, which took place well after it had become clear that Iraq was not going to be the cakewalk that the Bush administration claimed, as evidence that the country is simply so innately conservative that the Republicans have a built-in electoral advantage. The fact that Obama is black makes these pessimists even more gloomy.

Next page: Obama's story appeals to something fresh in the American psyche, McCain, to something as creaky as he is...