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“Skinny kid with funny name” reshapes politics

Manchester (New Hampshire): “They said this day would never come,” said the Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama at the outset of his barnstorming victory speech on Thursday night. But as he arrived in New Hampshire early on Friday, Americans woke up to the historic possibility that the day when they might have a black President was closer than they thought — not just within their lifetime, but within the year.

Until Thursday night, that was little more than a remote likelihood — a fresh-faced, freshman Senator whose middle name is Hussein up against the daunting might of the Clinton machine in the sixth whitest State in America. Last month, former President Bill Clinton asked if the United States was ready to “roll the dice” on an Obama presidency.

Iowa caucus-goers rolled. Mr. Obama won, leaving Iowa with 38 per cent of the vote, eight percentage points ahead of John Edwards and having pushed Hillary Clinton into third place with 29 per cent. They also took a chance on the Republican outsider, Mike Huckabee, who vaulted to a commanding victory over his main challenger, Mitt Romney.

But the night belonged to Mr. Obama, who told his supporters: “Hope is the bedrock of this nation. The belief that our destiny will not be written for us but by us.” He then flew into New Hampshire brimming with confidence.

Mr. Obama’s win was the result not of mobilising the Democratic base but transforming it. More than a third of his support was from the under-30s and most of those who backed him had never been to a caucus before. A large number of independents also flocked to him, helping to boost Democratic caucus goers to almost double the number four years ago.

In so doing, he not only helped remould the electoral landscape of the Democratic party, he also refashioned the racial expectations of America’s electoral politics. The days when black politicians stood for office in order to force the issues affecting black communities from the margins to the mainstream are over. Now they can stand to win. In the last 50 years the number of white people who said they would not vote for a black presidential candidate has nosedived from 53 per cent to just 6 per cent.

But that requires new strategies. Mr. Obama has played down his race and white voters have so far mostly played along, pretending either not to notice or suggesting that America has overcome such obstacles.

Mr. Obama’s theme has been change — healing the polarised political culture that has become entrenched over the last eight years. In a country embroiled in war, facing a possible recession where 71 per cent believe it is on the wrong track, his message of hope and change clearly resonated.

It was not entirely clear what that change would mean in practice, but it was always clear what it would look like: him. With a Kenyan father, Kansan mother, raised in Hawaii, studied at Harvard — some believed that literally he embodied change. From the outset he had described himself as “a skinny kid with a funny name”.

That his name was neither Clinton nor Bush may have mattered more than the fact that it rhymed with “Osama”. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008

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