Months ago I gave ten reasons why Obama would win the election.
Not the least of these was his professional campaign team. Usually liberals are stereotyped as wishful thinking idealists, and conservatives as hard-headed realists. But it was the Obama team that had the math and the Romney team that had the myth.
One thing for sure, the United States has the most dysfunctional electoral system of all democracies. Barbadian technical assistance, anyone?
I have never fully appreciated the German word “schadenfreude” (delight in the misfortunes of others) until I watched Karl Rove, the vaunted Republican strategist who had predicted a Romney landslide, have a meltdown on Fox News when Fox called Ohio for Obama.
You have to ask yourself why the far right demonizes Obama? Their conspiracy theories range from the unhinged to the deranged: he’s a secret Muslim who will impose sharia law on everyone; he’s a socialist/Nazi bent on destroying America; he was born in Kenya; he killed his grandparents to cover up his birth. And these are just the mildest slurs.
I can understand why many right-wingers might disagree with his social democratic policies, but why the personal vitriol?
Simple: they cannot accept that a black man heads the most powerful country in the world. This eats like acid into their racist souls. Had Romney won the election, they could have argued that Obama was an anomaly, a once in a lifetime freak accident, like a meteor crashing into Earth. But that the American people, even in the face of a savage recession, could reaffirm their trust in Obama and thus authenticate his presidency has them frothing with fury.
They refuse to recognize that America is undergoing a transformation that is demographic, cultural and technological. It’s a rapidly urbanizing country in which minorities (notably African American, Hispanic and Asian) will by 2040 outnumber Whites. There is also a growing cultural divide between rural and urban and older and younger generations, who are both more technologically savvy and more socially tolerant.
As a result, the older, largely rural and Protestant fundamentalist Whites who comprise the shrinking Republican core are filled with resentment at the change engulfing their society. To make matters worse, their fear and hatred of the modern world is stoked by the unremitting diet of falsehood and fantasy that Fox News and right-wing talk radio (Rush Limbaugh) spew.
Obama’s political genius was to recognize – well before 2008 – this tectonic change and to pitch his political message to the growing coalition (hence “we are the change we seek”), while harnessing the communication technologies of the digital era to his cause.
It helped that he himself was an enigmatic outsider – son of an African man and a white woman from Kansas – who spent his formative years abroad.
Obama has fascinating parallels with another famous charismatic politician, Pierre Trudeau of Canada: both outsiders with a unique insight into their own mainstream cultures; both intellectuals and constitutional lawyers fascinated by the histories of their countries.
Obama is the first postmodern president. He does not fit into the conventional ideological categories of liberal or conservative. He’s a pragmatic progressive, like Errol Barrow, who has both conservative and liberal instincts, as is clear from his books and his seminal speeches, the best of which are A More Perfect Union (about race in America), and his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance lecture – a superb philosophical discourse on the idea of a just war.
In his second term Obama will build upon the legacy of “Obamacare”. His strongest opposition will now come from the left. Once he has solved the looming fiscal crisis and gets the economy roaring back, look for an overhaul of immigration policy, and initiatives on tax reform, infrastructure, energy and climate change.
In foreign policy he’ll face down Iran; use his trump card, Bill Clinton, to tackle the elusive Israeli-Palestinian peace; and strengthen relations with China. He may even normalize relations with Cuba, thus accelerating democratic freedoms there.
Caribbean Community, please note.
• Peter Laurie is a retired diplomat and commentator on social issues.
