NEWSMAKERS
Triumph of American democracy
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Obama’s victory as America’s first black President-elect is unprecedented and cause for cautious celebration. S. SHANKAR
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Now we know. History, to flog that tired if true horse called Cliché into life for one more trot in the round, has been made. The world’s only superpower, a country with a shameful history of slavery and racial discrimination, will have it
s first black president. A century and a half after the end of slavery and a half century after the civil rights movement won black voters in many parts of the country the right to vote, Barack Hussein Obama will be the 45th president of the United States of America come January 2009. Unprecedented, certainly a word to be used with caution, seems wholly appropriate.
To halt history, Obama’s opponents came at him hard. They raised questions about his relative youth and inexperience, his ability to attract the crucial votes of working-class white men in what they liked to call the heartland, and his so-called socialist economic policies. They cast aspersions on his wife Michelle, insisted on making an issue out of what they saw as his connections to domestic terrorists and black radicals, and spread rumours about his Muslim-sounding middle name. They tried everything and everything they tried failed. Against all odds, Obama deflected the attacks.
Inspirational and disciplined
Why did Obama prevail? The answers are both in who Obama is and in when he was fortunate enough to make his bid for the presidency. By the time the campaign ended, it was clear to most objective observers that Obama is in equal measure an inspirational and a disciplined politician. His soaring oratory and his enormous stage presence are matched by an ability to do his homework and stay focused on the task at hand.
In a time of anxiety about the economic downturn at home and the U.S.’s entanglements in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama has offered both a vision of change and conveyed a reassuring calmness of disposition. Change can be inspirational but I understand it requires dogged hard work — Obama’s achievement has been to make enough Americans believe in both parts of the equation. He is to American politics what Virender Sehwag and Rahul Dravid combined would have been to Indian cricket.
The sporting reference is not entirely misplaced. It takes us to an important aspect of Obama’s triumphant campaign — his appeal to youth. Consider the use his campaign has made of Obama’s basketball skills. Remember the three-pointer jump shot? The one Obama sank in the basket on his first try while visiting American troops in his tour to West Asia and Afghanistan? How the God of Politics must have been looking out for him! The sensational shot was played endlessly on TV, adding to his allure. There have been other such basketball moments in the Obama campaign. You can find some of them on YouTube.
Of the youth
As the father of an enthusiastic 12-year-old player (his court nickname this past season was the Cobra), I have learnt the special mythology that surrounds basketball. If baseball represents tradition to America, basketball is youthful style (not without its own racial politics). Basketball is just one way Obama branded himself the youth candidate. His political appeal is cross-generational but he is, make no mistake, of the Age of the Internet, post-Vietnam War, very 21st century. Here the contrast with his vanquished rival John McCain is strong and the Obama campaign was certainly not shy in making sure voters noticed.
A second important aspect of Obama’s successful campaign is his savvy use of his multicultural identity. Much, as it should be, has been made of Obama’s race, less of his successful recasting of the race issue into more acceptable, multicultural terms. Obama’s roots in Hawai’i, his close relationship with his white grandmother with different roots in the mid-Western “heartland,” his white mother, his African father, his childhood in Indonesia — all these details, carefully cultivated and repeated in his campaign, create a profile not of an African American political figure in a familiar mould, but rather a cosmopolitan, multicultural candidate difficult to pin down. To the extent that Obama’s multicultural candidacy proved attractive and convincing to large numbers of voters, his black-ness, threatening to some, was softened. As much as Obama is America’s first black president, he is also its first truly multicultural one.
How will such a president govern? And what does his triumph say about American democracy?
Obama is a creature of the system. No use pretending otherwise. He has won as the candidate of one of the only two parties with any chance of capturing the White House. He is likely to govern a little to the left of centrist former President Bill Clinton. Whatever his personal beliefs, he cannot do otherwise. He represents change, but a small one. Larger, necessary changes in American political life are only possible with a viable third party that offers a real alternative to both the Democrats and the Republicans. For the emergence of such a third party, an Obama presidency will do nothing.
No matter. For a few days, let us not quibble. The rise of the youthful, black, multicultural candidate is still cause for cautious celebration. Obama does not hail from a political dynasty. In his origins, he does not come from wealth. His triumph suggests what is yet possible, perhaps against great odds, in American democracy. After eight years of George W. Bush, that surely deserves a modest hurrah for the candidate and for the system.
S. Shankar is a cultural critic and novelist. The Spanish translation of his latest book, No End to the Journey, is forthcoming. He teaches in the Department of English and is the Director of the Center for South Asian Studies at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.
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