Monday - June 09, 2008

Amid Barack Obamamania, John McCain could still win

Amid Barack Obamamania, John McCain could still win the US presidential election

By John O’Sullivan
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 08/06/2008

Yesterday, Hillary Clinton exited the presidential race, pledging loyal support to Barack Obama. In reality she was shaking her fist defiantly at the victor. Her prolonged farewell, though undignified, is not hard to understand.

Unless she bullies Obama into making her his vice-presidential candidate - which looks unlikely - she is leaving national politics as well as the 2008 campaign.

Despite all the praise for her gallant uphill fight, Mrs Clinton blew a sure thing. As the candidate of inevitability, she lost. As the candidate of competence, she won most major battleground states, but lost the nomination because her campaign failed to organise in the smaller states. As the candidate with an unrivalled Democratic Rolodex, she lost the “super-delegates”.

Even her late emergence as the friend of Joe Sixpack reflected her loss of most other Democratic constituencies rather than her recruitment of a new political base. She is a very implausible leader of a white working class that is drifting steadily towards the Republicans.

Her campaign’s excuse for defeat - that sexism trumped racism - implicitly accuses all Democrat voters of being bigots. It leaves behind a poisonous atmosphere of internecine identity politics on the Left. None of this augurs well for her post-2008 presidential prospects - whoever wins in November.

John McCain is probably the only Republican who could win the presidency in a year when almost any Democrat should beat almost any Republican. Voters prefer Democrats to Republicans by 15 per cent.

Even if McCain makes it to the White House, their opponents may win the Senate majority sufficient to override a presidential veto. McCain might well campaign in the final days on the theme “Help me to restrain a rampaging Democrat Congress”.

He could make such a pitch persuasively because he has spent the past eight years restraining the Republican Congress. McCain has repeatedly voted with Democrats against his own party on tax cuts, election finance, immigration, and much else.

Thus, he appeals to those voters who like a “maverick” and who would vote against any Republican representing continuity with George Bush. That potential support gives McCain a chance of winning - he is currently only a few percentage points behind Obama.

Unfortunately, many Republicans are annoyed with someone who apparently loves sticking his finger in their eyes. They may not vote for a Democrat, but they may not turn out for McCain either. And the same independent voters who admired McCain have been flocking to Obama since he won the opening contest - largely over the Iraq war.

In other words, party divisions are splintering. Both candidates need to assemble a new electoral coalition. In this, Obama is having as much difficulty as McCain. His coalition includes first-time voters, blacks, the higher educated and upper-income independents. But is he losing such Democratic staples as Hispanics and the white working class?

There is growing tension between Hispanics and blacks, and because an Obama victory could be seen as a triumph for blacks, the prospect pushes some Hispanics towards the Republican. But the Hispanic vote is less than a quarter of the white working class vote. It would be more serious for Obama if white workers rejected him massively - and far more damaging to America if they did so out of racial prejudice.

Neither seems to be the case. White workers have been shifting to the Right since Richard Nixon’s victory in 1968, so a Democrat can lose their support yet win overall. Recent polls show Obama losing white workers to the Republicans by smaller margins than Al Gore in 2000 or John Kerry in 2004. By that test, race has not harmed him here - he is doing better than previous Democrats.

Indeed race has probably helped him overall. Many more Americans are likely to vote for Obama to demonstrate (to themselves as well as others) that they are free of racism than will vote against him from bigotry. And the media coverage of Obama as rock star implies that voting against such an emblem of hope may itself signify racism. That is a real threat to McCain, and one difficult to counter.

But if Obama gains from race, he is threatened on another front. He had been gaining more and more votes from whites until his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, emerged to dominate the news with cranky anti-American sermons. That aroused fears that Obama was not a shaper of a post-racism America, but more radical, less trustworthy, and - worst of all - anti-American.

American patriotism, strong in all classes, is universal among blue-collar workers. McCain, a war hero, is its embodiment. And by taking too long to disavow Wright, Obama sowed doubts about his own patriotism that still linger. If not dispelled, those are McCain’s single best hope of achieving a win against the odds.

http://tinyurl.com/4zqzxz

Posted by Drew458     on 06/09/2008 at 03:27 PM   
Filed Under: • Politics •  
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