America weighs risk and rebirth

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America weighs risk and rebirth

 

JOHN IBBITSON

From Tuesday's Globe and Mail

 

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November 4, 2008 at 2:53 AM EST

 

CHICAGO — A year ago, Barack Obama was just another guy up on a

stage, one of the many also-runnings who flanked presumptive

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. He seemed a

candidate waiting to be consigned to the asterisks of history.

 

Today, unless every poll and credible prognostication turns out to be

wrong, Mr. Obama will be elected president of the United States.

 

And he will have done it by just standing there, and waiting for us

to come to him.

 

Mr. Obama has not changed over the past year. Those who know him

don't speak of growth or metamorphosis. He is fiercely ambitious -

has been his entire adult life - and he channelled that ambition into

an audacious campaign that harnessed high-tech know-how and strategic

brilliance to a phenomenal Internet-based grassroots movement.

 

And yet what mattered most was his constancy. Few Americans had ever

heard of this man. There was little in his background that most

people could relate to. His political résumé was promising but

incomplete. Why should anyone think of voting for him?

 

But Mr. Obama knew something about America that it didn't know about

itself. A profound generational shift is under way. The Vietnam War

is finally over: For the first time, a presidential candidate doesn't

need to account for the choices he had made during those years. He

was a child at the time.

 

The young are ready to push the boomers aside. The computer has

revolutionized politics, as well as everything else. And Republican

presidential nominee John McCain, whose choices in Vietnam heroically

defined him, doesn't know how to use a computer.

 

A new generation of southerners is ready to lay the Old South to

rest. And many within a new generation of African-Americans see

themselves as something other than angry victims.

 

Mr. Obama personified the change that was upon America, that the

ossified power structures of both the Democratic and Republican

parties tried to ignore or couldn't comprehend.

 

He and his coalition - the young, the re-enfranchised, the savvy, the

forward looking - wrested control of the Democratic Party from its

own leadership, and now they appear bound to do the same to

Washington.

 

Through it all, Mr. Obama remained unmovable and, at a certain level,

unknowable, yet somehow compellingly attractive. His opponents'

attempts to smear him as a dangerous socialist with unsavoury

connections to terrorists and radicals failed because most Americans

didn't believe a word of it. They had already taken the measure of

the man.

 

Even older voters, even more conservative voters, even white voters

still clinging to racial assumptions listened to him, many for the

first time, the night he won the Iowa caucuses, and they were

inspired.

 

They heard him explain his relationship to his former pastor,

Jeremiah Wright, and they accepted that he was no Jeremiah Wright.

 

They watched his performance during the candidates debates, and

throughout the unfolding financial crisis, and came away reassured.

 

Throughout the campaign, Republicans and other conservatives accused

the media of outrageous bias in favour of Mr. Obama, and they were

absolutely right. But reporters were only seeing what everyone else

was seeing. They drew the same conclusions that the broader

population had also drawn. They didn't lead the electorate to Barack

Obama; they were simply swept along with it.

 

Some politicians seek office and power because of the holes in their

lives. Teddy Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton -

these men fought demons that drove them to seek affirmation from

crowds; they sought public life to fill some inexplicable emptiness

within. All were, to varying degrees, brought down by this flaw.

 

Barack Obama seems more like Ronald Reagan or Dwight Eisenhower or

Franklin Roosevelt. Openly affable, these earlier presidents

nonetheless kept their inner centres hidden even from their closest

confidants. They neither needed nor wanted to define themselves by

what others thought of them. Mr. Obama, though his ego is larger than

is healthy, seems to share that quality as well. Voters appreciate

that.

 

They didn't appreciate the way John McCain changed, and changed

again, throughout the campaign. A sad legacy of this election is that

Mr. McCain, who served his country with honour and distinction

throughout his life, was diminished by his bid for the presidency.

 

The happy warrior recast himself as the battle-tested elder statesman

ready for the final challenge. Then he became a maverick - but

against what? His own party? Then he became a Cassandra, warning of

the dark times that would befall the republic if his Democratic

opponent and his shadowy co-conspirators seized power.

 

In the end, he just seemed angry and old.

 

There is a danger in all of this. Americans are on the cusp of

electing a president they know little about, who knows little about

what awaits him. As with John Kennedy, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton,

voters will be sending to the White House a president largely

untested on the national or international stage. All three presidents

made grave mistakes in the early years of their presidency. Mr.

Carter never recovered; Bill Clinton did. With Mr. Kennedy, we'll

never really know.

 

But Americans seem to have decided it's worth the risk. It's time,

they've decided, for a rebirth of freedom, time to slough off a

failing generation of leadership and embrace hope for renewal. More

than anything else, they trust this man.

 

They may yet be cruelly disappointed. But that is for another day.

 

JOHN IBBITSON

From Tuesday's Globe and Mail

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