Only a 9/11 can prevent Obama's victory
Monday November 03 2008
Everybody on American television is being very polite on the eve of this historic US presidential election. In an increasingly desperate attempt to keep the race competitive, normally candid commentators are still treating both Barack Obama and John McCain as potential winners.
It's a bit like an Antrim v Kerry all-Ireland football final where RTE's commentators keep mapping out surreal scenarios where the underdog can win. Rather than best election etiquette, in some cases the coyness is prompted by superstition and a fear of putting a jinx on the favourite.
The reality is that the people who really know believe it would take an event as seismic as September 11 for John McCain to win. And barring epic human folly or intergalactical interference, Barack Obama will be declared the 44th President-elect of the United States around 3am Irish-time on Wednesday morning.
The most hotly argued point now is whether or not Obama will win by a landslide.
Race and gender have made this one of the most extraordinary campaigns in the country's 232-year history. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton slugged it out in a gruelling contest to be the Democratic candidate for the presidency with Sarah Palin potentially the first woman vice-president.
The home truths are laid bare in terms of passion and numbers: 85pc of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track in this first billion-dollar election where Barack Obama had raised $640m by mid-October. Just why a naturally conservative and cautious country like the US has reached out to the handsome young black man can be explained by a recent poll.
War
The History News Network polled 109 professional historians and 61pc of them rated George W Bush the worst president in US history. A couple of the more thoughtful judged him second worst, after James Buchanan whose epic incompetence led to civil war. More than 98pc of the history professors viewed Bush's presidency as a failure.
From that background a campaign built on the words "hope", "change"and "progress" struck a chord with blacks whose marching fathers were attacked by dogs and clubbed senseless.
Reflecting back to January when Obama won the Iowa caucuses, black writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, wrote in 'Time' magazine: "I knew for the first time in my life, that it would be a good year to be black.
"Consider this fact: the most famous black man in America isn't dribbling a ball or clutching a microphone. He has no prison record. He has not built a career on four-letter words."
It was also back in January that Hillary Clinton's eyes welled with the tears that feminists declared to be a metaphor for the treatment of women in America.
A debate emerged on talk shows and lunch counters then as to whether sexism or racism was the more potent and it intensified when Sarah Palin became a candidate in the summer. From the early 1990s until 2008, Bill Clinton and his successor George W Bush marked the presidential age for babyboomers. But a new Obama era promises to represent something else: that multicultural, post-racial society so often held up like a mythical promised land.
And the Obama story is a radical variation on the classic American fairytale depicting a president making it from a log cabin to the White House.
The son of a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas, raised in Indonesia and Hawaii who became a hero at Harvard Law School.
He also reinvented the way America conducts its national politics. Americans look back in wonder to the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon contest where just under 64pc voted. A senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, Michael P McDonald, who studies voting patterns, predicts that more will vote tomorrow in the highest turnout of voters since 1908.
Internet
That 1960 Kennedy-Nixon contest was the first dominated by television. But Obama has made this 2008 race the debut of the internet election registering tens of millions of minority voters.
When the final accounts are tallied, Obama is expected to have raised $700m from the internet; both candidates in the 2004 election, President George W Bush and Senator John Kerry, raised just $684m combined and then both took public financing.
With a global economic recession looming and the probable election of a young black man who dared to be different, it is perhaps time to take stock of recent events.
Here in New York it is worth recalling the opening sentence of Charles Dickens' 'A Tale of Two Cities':
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way."
