Great expectations

Americans have pressed the reset button on the promise of America. That is cause enough for all of us to join in the celebration and the hope.

THESE are the worst of times and the best of times. Except that in the present context this is better suited to being the opening line of Great Expectations rather than A Tale of Two Cities. Moreover, in being elected the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama has done far better for America and the world than for himself. To switch literary gears, bliss will be it to wake up on the January dawn when Obama takes oath of office. The rivers of tears in the sea of faces during his victory speech in Chicago on the night of November 4 bore witness to the enormity of the world changing, even when nothing has changed, and the weight of expectations that will burden him from day one.

Obamas victory is rooted in three factors: structural changes in American society and politics, Obamas own performance, and strategic blunders by his opponent.

The structural changes since President George W. Bush won the election eight years ago are as profound domestically as they are globally. With almost 200,000 troops bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, America is overstretched militarily. Russia is returning, China is resurgent, and even India is on the rise. Economically, the U.S. national debt is close to $10 trillion, double what it was when Bush took office. The $700 billion surplus he inherited from the Clinton administration has been turned into a half-trillion-dollar deficit.

The reputational freefall of the past few years has been so steep and deep that the respect and admiration in which America used to be held are but dim and fading memories. The hope and optimism that the country proudly symbolised have given way to the indignity of everyone having to take off their shoes prior to entering boarding areas at U.S. airports and fortress-embassies abroad that project fear and paranoia where once courage and welcome ruled.

Domestically, job creation under Bush fell to one-sixth of its level under Bill Clinton. Five million more Americans have been pulled down into poverty and another seven million have been pushed out of health insurance coverage as premiums almost doubled. The Bush administration also oversaw a massive redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich as income inequality widened. In the meantime, the demographic composition of U.S. society itself changed significantly. The great-melting-pot society has produced a plurality of ethnic and religious groups jostling for space and attention in the crowded political landscape.

The net result of these internal and global changes was that Americans became weary of further overseas military entanglements and, therefore, suspicious of Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran McCain; fretful of the Iraq quagmire and thus supportive of the candidate who promised to terminate that war rather than the one who threatened to continue it indefinitely until an impossible-to-define victory was achieved; anxious to retain jobs and be reassured on health care affordability and old-age pension; and receptive to Obamas promise to reverse the shift in relative taxation under Bush from the rich to the rest that McCain, contrary to his earlier principles, wanted to retain.

The wedge-issues of guns and flags, and the culture wars against homosexuals and minorities, are increasingly irrelevant to the young. When Obama was born of a black Kenyan father and a white Kansas mother, in several States of the United States his parents could have been charged with the criminal offence of miscegenation. Today, inter-racial marriage and mixed-race children rarely draw attention or comment.

The best articulation of these changes came from former Secretary of State and long-time Republican Colin Powell. Endorsing Obama on October 19, Powell noted how so often Obama had been accused of being a Muslim. The correct answer to this, he said, is that Obama is Christian, not Muslim. The right answer, he added, is what if he was? He then recalled a photo in a magazine, of an American mother mourning her 20-year-old soldier son, Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, slain in Iraq. The top of the headstone of her sons grave in Arlington National Cemetery had not a Christian cross nor the Jewish Star of David but the Islamic star and crescent.

There is nothing wrong, Powell insisted, with a seven-year-old Muslim American child believing that he or she could be the President of the country. Fareed Zakaria made the same argument in his column in Newsweek on October 27 in opting for Obama, saying that his nine-year-old son Omars horizons would be broader in a country that had chosen one Barack Hussein Obama as its 44th President.

Obama appears to possess all the qualities of a truly great President, and the combination of grave domestic and foreign, economic and security crises gives him the opportunity to prove it. He has a razor-sharp intellect, poise, grace, an even temperament, a strong character, eloquence and oratorical skills that can inspire and rouse the multitude, and organisational brilliance that can harness their energy and enthusiasm to a larger purpose.

His message never wavered over the nearly two years of the campaign: the need for change guided by the hope for a better future. His style, too, remained largely constant: speaking respectfully to Americans as fellow-adults and appealing to their better angels. He proved the enduring veracity of Ronald Reagans (and Bill Clintons) political insight that it is better to appeal to the peoples best hopes than to their worst fears.

The primary and general election campaigns were models of fund-raising and organisation, in registering voters and getting out the vote, which will be studied in classrooms and campaign headquarters for years to come. Obama converted stumbling blocks, for example his one-time preacher Jeremiah Wright, into stepping stones: delivering one of the great speeches on race. His cool and calm demeanour gave the pictorial lie to increasingly wild allegations of radicalism and consorting with terrorists. While he successfully eschewed the caricature of the angry black man, McCain fell victim to the imagery of an angry old man who was increasingly out of arguments, out of tune with the changing times, and also out of time. The three presidential debates were crucial in cementing their contrasting personas.

Strategically, Obama carried on from where he had left off in the contest against Hillary Clinton, focussing on the delegate count in the primaries and the electoral college count in the general election. For, in reality, there is not one election to choose the President but a combination of 50 separate elections State-by-State, with the winner taking all electoral college votes in every State in which he wins. In both the primary and the general election, Obama launched and led a social movement that relied on new forms of organisation and created a sense of excitement last felt at the time of John F. Kennedy. Obamas background in community organisation, derided by political rivals to their own great cost, proved the key both to his success at the bottom-up strategy and to his ability to connect with the broader community.

Battling strong headwinds, any Republican candidate was likely to lose this election. Still, Senator John McCain made three strategic blunders that contributed to the scale of his defeat: the choice of running mate, the reaction to the financial crisis, and the recourse to negative attacks. Where Obama grew in stature by the manner in which he met every challenge McCain retreated into the farthest fringes of American politics as the campaign progressed.

As the Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin was hardly known in the rest of the country. Apparently she wowed a travelling troupe of Republican kingmakers with her social conservatism, articulate speaking skills, attractive persona and strong reformist credentials. But the more she was exposed to the people and the campaign managers tried to limit her exposure as much as possible, with not a single press conference in the entire campaign the more her failings shone through.

To put it bluntly, she was arrogant, ignorant and a wacko, literally winking her way through the vice-presidential debate with Joe Biden. And deeply polarising and confrontational to boot. The disenchanted McCain camp is now busy leaking all sorts of stories about her, such as believing that Africa is a country, not a continent. Opinion polls in the later stages of the campaign and exit polls on the night of the election confirm that she proved a net liability for McCain, with substantial numbers of people questioning his judgment as a result of her selection as running mate.

That question mark over judgment grew bigger on September 24 when McCain responded to the financial crisis by announcing that he was suspending his campaign and cancelling his appearance in the first presidential debate in order to return to Washington to broker a solution. In contrast, Obama came across as calm and measured in a crisis, a steadying influence against McCains erratic and temperamental response matching the impulsive selection of Palin without proper vetting or due diligence.

Palin also performed, with gusto, the running mates traditional role of attack dog. It was unfortunate that early on she alluded to herself as a pit-bull with lipstick. The old-style unrelenting series of negative attacks on Obama in speeches, radio and television advertising, and by computer-generated automated telephone calls with many of the attacks bearing only the most tenuous of connections to reality and truth was a massive turn-off for most independent voters.

In his choice of running mate and campaign narrative, McCain had to perform two contradictory tasks: rally the Republican base and attract the independent, floating voters. The selection of Palin and the resort to negative attacks rallied the base but repelled the independents. They also rallied the Democratic base, neutralising the anger of Hillary Clintons supporters and others who had been shocked by how quickly and how much Obama had tacked to the centre as soon as he clinched the party nomination. Not only did McCain fail to outline a positive vision of why people should vote for him, he also, by taking the low road, alienated many who had supported him previously for his principled stands.

The Republican Party of George W. Bush abandoned its core principles of small government, fiscal conservatism and suspicion of entangling overseas engagements. But there is a larger problem. Its base the real America to which both McCain and Palin appealed is a shrinking demographic as America in reality becomes increasingly diverse on almost every demographic attribute. The old Dixie is dead; appealing to that ever-shrinking minority will be a losing strategy henceforth.

The party will have to abandon its hostility to intellectuals, become more socially inclusive and welcome new ideas as well as social cohorts. The prospects within the Republican Party of a rapid rise of the Bobby Jindals of America have grown brighter. The Democrats will hope that the Republicans are slow learners. Yet it is the latter who led the way with the high-profile inclusiveness of Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice.

In the middle of his victory speech, Obama cautioned jubilant supporters that even while they celebrated they knew that the challenges confronting them were the greatest of their lifetime: Two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century. The emphatic margins of victory for the Democrats on Capitol Hill as well as in the White House mean that the size of the mandate matches the enormity of the challenges. Obama won 365 electoral college votes to McCains 162. The polls proved remarkably accurate: Obamas election-night margin of victory was 6.5 per cent, compared with the 7.6 per cent average of opinion polls compiled by Real Clear Politics. The Democrats gained at least six Senate and 20 House seats in Congress, with a few still to be decided at the time of writing.

In his speech on race in March, Obama made it clear how the history of racism is not a specifically black problem but rather a generic American problem. The nation as a whole would continue to have been hobbled in fulfilling its manifest destiny until such time as it had cleansed its soul of this stain. How appropriate then that Virginia, the capital and heart of the confederacy, should have voted for Obama. And he won the votes of the working class whites in Indiana, once a stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan. Some pollsters tell stories of southern whites saying theyll be voting for the nigger. One small step for Obama, a giant leap for equality.

In his victory speech, Obama fittingly framed the progress around the story of the 106-year-old black woman Ann Nixon Cooper, who during her lifetime had witnessed the enfranchisement of both women and blacks, the forced bussing in Montgomery and the hoses in Birmingham during the great civil rights movement, and cast her vote for Obama in this election. The cascade of memories that brought bittersweet tears of joy and sadness to the likes of Jesse Jackson and Oprah Winfrey on election night, captured vividly on camera, has been collectively cathartic for the nation.

In cadence and vision as well as in words, Obama consciously channelled Martin Luther Kings great speech when he said he had climbed the mountain and seen the promised land. I may not get there with you, King said, but he promised that his people would. The next day he was killed. Heres Obama on November 4: The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America, I promise you we as a people will get there. He echoed John F. Kennedy in calling for a new spirit of patriotism, service and responsibility. And, finally, for good measure, he quoted Abraham Lincoln on the need for national healing: Though our passions may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.

Obama has pledged to end the war in Iraq and bring the troops home as soon as possible without endangering their lives or risking a complete collapse. The war in Afghanistan he wants to win by reinforcing the troops with more American and allied soldiers while reinvigorating the nation-building side of the equation. The endangered planet desperately needs not merely U.S. engagement but American leadership on the threat of climate change that may already have crossed the tipping point.

The financial crisis is a crisis of governance, both domestic and global. The world is interdependent in areas as diverse as financial markets, infectious diseases, energy security, climate change, natural disasters (think of the 2004 tsunami), terrorism, product safety, food supply and water tables. This is why, in Obamas words, although our stories are singular, our destinies are shared. Yet our collective capacity to manage this shared destiny through coordinated policy responses has fallen behind the rise in the number and intensity of interdependent sectors. In a world in which the risks and perils are global, responsibilities too have to be global.

To borrow language from the climate-change context, all countries have a common but differentiated responsibility for the stability of the global economic and financial systems. The major developing countries Brazil, China, India, Mexico, South Africa have limited access to current global decision-making channels and sharing the responsibility for managing the global order. In order to be made responsible stakeholders in the management of global regimes and the outcomes that come from collective decisions, they need joint ownership of the process. The existing institutions and arrangements can no longer cope with the growing number, range and gravity of the major global problems. The accumulating anomalies need to be addressed urgently and collectively. The global financial crisis is an opportunity to replace antiquated, creaking and not-up-to-the-task institutions with more efficient, effective and credible mechanisms and forums.

The dramatic challenges during and at the end of the Second World War produced a generation of statesmen who rose to the occasion for designing new institutions that have served their purpose well but have been overtaken by new circumstances. Most are now moribund, tattered, outdated or anachronistic. We need leaders who can rise to the challenges of the 21st century and embed multilateral cooperation in global institutions crafted in and for this century. Redesigning the architecture of global governance, from peace and security to development and finance, environmental protection and resource conservation, and human rights and humanitarian protection, is an urgent task of international diplomacy.

Obama gained the presidency by using civic nationalism to transcend ethnic bounds. He could be a leader for a world bereft of statesmen by using cosmopolitan internationalism to transcend national boundaries. On the night of November 4, he promised to listen especially to those who disagreed with him. One hopes that he will display the same trait towards countries that disagree with the United States, abandoning the deeply alienating habit of belittling, dismissing and attacking anyone and everyone with a dissenting point of view whether domestically or abroad.

Historically, Republican Presidents begin as instinctive unilateralists and end up as reluctant multilateralists. Democrats are the opposite, starting off as soft multilateralists by belief but finishing as unilateralists by practice. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush are good examples. Obama promises that a new dawn of American leadership is at hand. Let us hope so. For in an increasingly interdependent and globalised world, the promise of the always imperfect yet ever-perfecting union that out of many, we are one applies just as much to the world beyond Americas shores as it does to all within, from sea to shining sea and from ocean to warming ocean.

The problems and perils, the hatreds and divisions, the threats and the challenges neither fade nor dwindle. But that is tomorrows task. Americans have just pressed the reset button on the promise of America. That is cause enough for all of us to join in the celebration and the hope.

Ramesh Thakur is the founding director of the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Ontario.