Obama rocks on but what does he really stand for?

Barack Obama: Promising a healing presidency
12 April 2012

Two emails reached me - and a few million others - overnight. One came from Barack Obama's campaign and steams with righteous anger: "Senator Clinton is launching what even her aides admit is a 'kitchen sink' bombardment of negative attacks against Barack ... Show your support for a new kind of politics and a new kind of leadership."

A few minutes later, up pops Chelsea Clinton begging us to give support to "my mom, who is working her heart out for what she believes in".

The Clinton campaign, once so full of destiny, reeks of desperate pathos.

Both sides, when you get past the eyecatching stuff, want money for their campaigns, which they are burning up in a voracious contest of television advertising and local organisation ahead of the key votes in Ohio and Texas next week.

The further Obama ascends towards the White House, the thinner the political oxygen becomes. The turban moment this week - when a picture of Mr Obama in African national dress and exotic (aka Muslim) headgear surfaced on the web - and a slew of stories about dubious loans and a shady property deal by his main bagman, were the moment the mudfight began in earnest.

The dark arts of campaigning are back and not without their effectiveness in underlining that Obama is an unusual American. His absentee father was a polygamous Kenyan, his mother fiercely Baptist and he was brought up in Hawaii.

From an unconventional background, he has brewed what we might call "Obamapolitics" - the soft-contoured mix of views and policies that deny categorisation.

So he has the social conscience and voting record of a classic Democrat, wants a greater sense of self-responsibility in poor black communities, and is a " liberal" on the core issue of healthcare insurance (as opposed to Hillary's onelast-heave for a universal healthcare scheme). He has always worked closely with Republicans in his home state and in the Senate - whereas Mrs Clinton defined her outlook with her famous accusation of a "vast Right-wing conspiracy".

Obamapolitics has its British application-too. It embodies broad appeal and outreach that David Cameron and David Miliband aspire to reinvent, post-Blair. Both are avid admirers. Gordon Brown has been closer, in style and outlook, to the Clinton camp, with its faith in large projects and fixation on detail - though a new British ambassador has hastened to redress the impression that No 10 roots solely for Hillary.

If there is a tension in this smooth new world, it is between the radical sense of injustice and challenge he evokes in recounting the sense of mission his mother instilled from boyhood - "To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny" - and the passionate vagueness today of the "Yes we can!" speeches. Yes we can do - well, what exactly? His autobiography is called The Audacity of Hope. Its nostrums are markedly unaudacious.

The man himself has lost nothing in freshness since I first saw him perform at a Democrat Convention of 2005. He promises the healing presidency that America - and much of the world outside it - hankers for. The desire to feel good about themselves - a strong American instinct. It has taken a poundingin the presidency of George Bush. Apprehension begins on inspection of what his priorities would be. Mr Obama's speeches are not vague by accident - they are conceived that way to carry the maximum number of people with him and to dilute differences wherever possible. It is the opposite of the " dividing lines" strategy the parties have fallen back into in Britain (to the extent that they claim the distinctions between them are greater than they really are).

He does not lack clarity - if anything, on the single dominant foreign policy issue of the campaign, Iraq, he has been a model of consistency. He voted not to go into a "dumb war" in autumn 2002 and in spring 2008, he advocates immediate withdrawal.

Alas, that takes little account of what has happened since, not least the reduction in violence since the surge stemmed the worst of it in and around Baghdad. It is not at all clear that the Obama instant withdrawal makes sense in Iraq, regardless of what view one takes of the invasion and its aftermath.

The candidate who has been most prescient about the war on terror and Iraq is not Obama but the Republican candidate John McCain.

It is Mr McCain who highlighted early the flaws in the Bush segue from the fight against terror into an embrace of morally illicit and legally questionable methods of dealing with it in Guantanamo, torture and rendition. It is also Mr McCain who warned that the postwar strategy in Iraq was flawed - and suggested the remedies only latterly enforced by the Bush administration. He has a bottom line on Iran - Mr Obama trusts to optimism that disaster can be averted.

This has led to the creation of a sizeable group of people, myself included, who

are emotionally pro-Barack and intellectually pro-McCain.

Even if McCain finally proves too old, too stilted and too cross to carry the Presidency, he embodies many of the questions that will confront any White House incumbent after the present one.

One huge risk awaits Obamapolitics, and it comes with the ghost of another cheerful Democrat, Jimmy Carter, in tow. Carter succeeded in bringing an end to calculating, at times cynical, Kissingerian foreign policy. The enthusiasm for this yielded fast to a contempt for him as an unworldly peanut farmer, out of his depth in the Cold War.

True, the hyper-educated Obama is in a different league. Yet digging around in his foreign policy speeches yields a contradictory harvest. He wants a greater commitment to Afghanistan but is highly likely to face the same unpopularity and even isolation as regards that mission as the Bush administration felt in Iraq. The reluctance of other countries to share the burden is unlikely to change just because a new leader is asking them more politely.

Obama's balancing asset to all this uncertainty is that he is, as Americans concisely put it, "smart". He has an ability to spot a trap set by his enemies and stroll insouciantly around it . So although he recollects learning the ropes as a political organiser for the unions, he preaches about the joys of capitalism as the basis of sound labour relations.

There is no yin without a yang in this creed of perfect balance. Like a supercharged Tony Blair for the 21st century, Obama contains multitudes. Clinton falters in the old realm of "hard choices" and gritty arguments. Obamapolitics glides on and up, while America - and the rest of us - wait to discover what it really is.

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