Ian Williams - Letter from America

AT THE time of writing, Barack Obama has finally won enough support to secure the Democratic nomination for the White House, but Hillary Clinton has still not conceded. Perhaps she still hopes her rival may be found in bed with Osama bin Laden or even that one of her “hard-working white voters” may be catalysed by her evocation of Robert Kennedy’s assassination as an example of how primary outcomes can change unexpectedly.  She has allegedly told her New York congressional colleagues that she would be open to running as Vice President on an Obama/Clinton ticket. Obama would have to compromise his promise of turning over a new leaf in politics by grafting two of the most unprincipled egotists in recent American politics onto his election campaign.

One former Vice President memorably compared the importance of the office to a “bucketful of warm spit”. However a job-share with Hillary (which it surely would be) could be guaranteed to bring the house down if the Clintons did not get their own way. Look what they have already done that by prolonging the agony, hoping something would turn up.

The debilitating effect of the Democratic primaries has been as I predicted a year ago. Millions of dollars have been spent squaring Hillary Clinton off against Barack Obama using the same slimeball tactics the Republican right used against her and her husband. The difference is that Monica Lewinski was real while Obama’s “madrasa” education was wholly fictional.

It isn’t really possible to exonerate Clinton from playing to the worst racist and anti-Muslim sentiments. Would such an experienced hand really have “accidentally” mentioned that she had the strongest support among hard-working “white” folks, with the consequent assumption that non-whites and feckless poor blacks were Obama supporters? Her comments were the equivalent of Obama claiming he had the support of most politically astute males while only ditzy bra-burners supported Hillary. And was her Kennedy assassination quip a lapse in judgement or a Freudian slip?

To his credit, Obama has been turning the other cheek and not fighting back in kind, as the Clintons would have liked, since then he would have forfeited the nice guy and responsible party person image which has won him the support of party activists. While Hillary wanted to know why he had not disavowed Jeremiah Wright, Obama declined to to ask why the Clintons had invited the fiery pastor to the White House.

Obama diligently avoided damaging future Democratic prospects against John McCain, which he could easily have done by rattling the numerous skeletons in the Clinton closet. She showed no such inhibitions. For Bill and Hillary, all politics is personal. The purpose is to save the country and the world by getting themselves into power.

Her hanging on in the primaries when it was statistically impossible to win was quintessentially Clintonesque in the best family tradition. Somewhat reminiscent of Comical Ali as Baghdad fell, her question to the media has been: “Who are you going to believe – me or the evidence of your own eyes?”

First, she discounted the popular vote and alerted everyone to the importance of the “super-delegates.” Then, when the latter turned against her because of her manifest willingness to sacrifice the Democrats’ chances on the altar of her self-perceived worthiness, she decided the popular vote was what mattered after all – discounting the states that sensibly have caucuses. Originally, she agreed that the Florida and Michigan delegations should not be counted because they broke the rules on primaries, then changed her mind because she need their votes.

While these standards of duplicity certainly make Hillary a fitting successor to the last two occupants of the White House, Obama will have to do his maths very carefully to weigh how many extra votes she brings to the equation – and keep looking over his shoulder.

This is not to say that Obama’s election is in any way going to resemble the second coming. Any candidate who has been through the mill of the primaries has been ground down towards the centre and – Fox slurs notwithstanding – he did not exactly begin the race out of left field. But he has shown more integrity than either McCain or Clinton. On foreign policy issues, he has offered some hope compared with them.

Perhaps most important is what his adoption as the Democratic candidate, let alone his election as President, represents. While faux-feminist supporters of Clinton claimed the first woman in the White House had more potential social content than the election of a black, it does not stand up to scrutiny (not least for those of who saw the downside of the first woman in Number 10 Downing Street). Women in the United States were not generally kidnapped, raped, enslaved, tortured and terrorised – unless they were black. They were not lynched, disenfranchised and banned from living in decent areas or going to decent schools, as happened to black men and women in recent, living memory. Obama’s election would finally put some truth in the pleasant rumours that the opponents of slavery spread some two score decades ago about us all being created equal.