by Bill Stewart
With the election only a few days away, it looks increasingly likely that Sen Barack Obama will be the next President of the United States. I say “increasingly likely” because nothing will be certain until the election is over and the votes have been counted. We need only remember the famous election of 1948 when President Harry Truman won one of the great upset victories of the 20th century. The polls showed that Republican Tom Dewey had such a big lead that Gallup didn’t even poll during the final week of the campaign. By so doing, Gallup – and much of the country – failed to note a last minute surge for Truman that carried him to his historic and improbable victory.
Could that happen again, but this time for Sen John McCain? This year, the polls indicate an almost certain victory for Obama, but with such serious unknowns in the polls that any such prediction is risky. How many of the young, presumably pro-Obama, voters will actually vote? How big a factor is race? How many of those “likely to vote” will actually turn out to vote? For whom have the astonishingly large number of early voters actually voted? By the end of this week, the race was tightening on a national basis, but much less so in the “battleground” states. Obama has maintained such a lead in traditionally Republican states as Virginia, North Carolina and Nevada, that we may well be seeing a remake of the political map. It could turn out that if Obama wins, his electoral college vote will be much larger than his popular vote might otherwise indicate.
Obama’s “infomercial” this week brought him full circle. He started his campaign with a call for change and a message of hope, and in these last days he went back to it. It may have been uplifting, resting on his renowned skills as an inspirational speaker, but it was also short on specifics, leading to the charge running through the entire campaign that he was unknown, untried and untested. His resume was too thin to make him a credible president. In other words, he wasn’t ready. Even his Democratic primary opponents made those charges, including his running mate Sen Joe Biden.
Much has changed in the past year. At this point, he is scarcely unknown. His face has become as familiar as that of our next door neighbor. The rigors of the campaign have shown that he is not only intelligent and intellectually curious but possesses the quality that best exemplified John F. Kennedy: grace under pressure. In modern terms, he’s cool.
Yes, at 47 Obama is a relatively young man. But then, Kennedy was only 42 when he was elected. This election, I believe, is historically significant for two major reasons. First, Obama is an African-American, so his candidacy for that reason alone has been historic. It will be even more so if he is elected, helping to give us the psychological climate necessary to deal more thoroughly with America’s original sin. Secondly, if he wins, the torch will have been passed from one generation to another. Eisenhower, the World War 11 hero, handed the torch to Kennedy, and the nation was thrilled. If Obama wins, the torch, symbolically, will have passed from a 72 year-old war hero to a man young enough to be his son. An Obama victory will mark a generational change of exceptional importance. There will be no repeat performance for Sen McCain.
The conservative revolution that began under President Ronald Reagan has almost certainly come to an end. Economically, it is dead, the financial crisis bearing witness to the autopsy. Reagan, almost McCain’s age when he became president, was considerably more moderate than the right-wing, capitalist fundamentalists that came to dominate the economic philosophy of the Republican party. We have seen where that has led us. The party moved from its traditional base in the East, especially the Northeast, and its moorings among the moderate and the moneyed. It moved to the South and the Southwest, home-base of the religious and social conservatives who care less about money than they do about ideology. That is still their outlook, and they have cost their party dearly. The country as a whole simply does not share their anti-choice, anti-gay “little America” outlook. The world is passing them by, leaving the rightwing to choke on its own vitriol. If Obama wins, it will be historic, but the passing of the Republican party as we know it, is also historic. If Obama wants to reinvent the New Deal, and I believe he does, then the challenge for Republicans is to reinvent their party.
A new New Deal will be a challenge for all Americans. The basis of it will be fashioning a universal health care system. We don’t yet know what shape this will take, but certainly it is coming. This will bring us into line with the rest of the world’s major countries. If fairness and equity is socialist, then so be it. But I reject labels that distort, and socialist is one of them. American ingenuity will almost certainly find its own variety of universal care. The world as a whole is ready for a new deal. If Obama is elected, that will one of his great challenges.