RACE to the FINISH

This time next week, give or take a hanging chad or a tropical storm, we should know whether Barack Obama is to be a two-term or a one-term president. That the electoral outcome could be in doubt has only really been a matter of moment since the first television debate between the two major candidates (I think we can safely discount the possibility that Roseanne Barr, the Peace and Freedom Party candidate, will be the 45th occupant of the Oval Office).

It says a lot about the tenor of American politics and its relationship with television that Mitt Romney’s campaign, hitherto universally scorned as the most inept in the modern era, could be turned around simply because he was able to trot through three debates without perpetrating a major gaffe and because the incumbent was perceived to be relatively subdued in the first of the encounters. Such a low threshold of credibility hardly suggests that the American electorate is either very thoughtful or very far-sighted.

Moreover, one might imagine that sufficient numbers of snake-oil salesmen have run for public office in the US for the voters to be leary of broad and uncosted promises. Yet no presidential candidate since Richard Nixon has been more ready to say anything to get elected than Mitt Romney. Can any member of the Republican team say, hand on heart, that they know for a certainty what is Romney’s definitive position on any issue of the day?

Mitt's tax affairs remain a mystery

This readiness to embrace an implausible candidate who reckons to carry the right-wing banner is a peculiarly American trait. Just as the twice-elected George W Bush was at best a joke and in general an inadequate to the rest of the world, so Obama remains held in high esteem everywhere except in the States. Under a Republican chief executive, disobliging remarks about his character and record are held to be un-American. Yet the most vituperative abuse is poured onto Obama’s head by Tea Party adherents and others. This says a lot about innate attitudes in America. Indeed, it is absurdly difficult to overestimate the unblushing conservatism of a huge proportion of the American populace.

In a posting earlier this year – The Elephant is Still in the Room (March 12th) – I explained why I feared that Obama’s declaration that he would ask the rich to contribute “just a little bit more” to the economy was something that might deny him re-election. I still don’t discount that but I detect a more potent swell against the incumbent. And I am sorry to say that I believe it is the race issue.

Those attacks on Obama that are meant to be abusive and damaging are really addressed to the notion of his legitimacy as an American. And even after four years of him leading and representing the American people on the world stage – certainly with no less dignity or distinction than any of his predecessors – these nay-sayers have revived the attacks with even greater venom. There are three prongs to these absurd claims: that he is “secretly” a Muslim, that he is nakedly a Socialist and that he was not born in Hawaii as his birth certificate clearly states.

Dog-lovers have never forgiven Mitt for driving hundreds of miles with the family dog in a cage lashed to the car roof

From Donald Trump upwards, people of malicious intent and clinical stubbornness insist that, despite a total lack of any corroborating evidence, all these assertions are true. Outside the States, there are millions who – unlike the Americans – have actually lived under Muslim or Socialist governments and who therefore can recognise the genuine article. Show me anyone in the world outside the Republican-Tea Party nexus in the States who sincerely reckons that Obama is either a Muslim or a Socialist.

But of course Obama is an “outsider”, not a “proper” American so it stands to reason that he would be trying to impose “foreign” notions on the upstanding Americans: QED. The whole cockamamie stance speaks to the real objection to Obama, the racial objection. A few weeks ago, a Florida woman gave her vox pop view to a BBC reporter. Mitt Romney she declared “has more experience. And more class”. You can hear precisely what she means underneath those words: “why, Mr Romney is white”.

A placard sometimes seen at Romney rallies yells: “Put the white back in the White House”. It would be encouraging if the Republican stewards told the bearers to take these down but they don’t. As with every other issue, Mitt Romney has played fast and loose with the race card. Would he support the implementation of the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act (the DREAM Act), a federal measure designed to admit to citizenship those integrated children whose parents brought them to the US without proper documentation? Romney has said yes, no and partly. Then Romney has floated the elusive notion of “self-deportation”, a technique that is theoretically voluntary, yet you just know that its implementation would be accompanied by techniques designed to impel the inadequately documented to leave.

Having no foreign policies of his own, Mitt is apt to echo Barack's

Voting in Arizona will be watched with particular interest in connection with this matter. The state’s immigration law is bitterly resented by the Hispanic community and its chief architect was recruited to be a Romney advisor. Arizona has been safely in the Republican camp since favourite-son Barry Goldwater’s run for president in 1964. But lately, against the trend, Obama has been eating into Romney’s lead there. Instead of being marked as “Republican” in the forecasting graphics, Arizona is now counted, in the jargon, “leaning Republican”. That may have great significance, not just for this election but for future political developments.

As it happens, Romney has immigration issues in his own family. Though his myriad sons have all-American names like Biff, Jerk and Schlong rather than Dai, Rhys and Gwrddywal, Romney is married to a woman whose parents came from Wales. What’s more, Ann Romney’s father was fiercely opposed all his life to supernatural superstition and was shamefully baptised into the Mormon church by his children within days of his death in 1992. He’d have been incandescent with rage to be dragooned into what he termed “hogwash”. For his children, this must have looked like the DREAM solution.

One of the most heartening aspects of the 2008 election was the way Obama’s candidature galvanised non-whites. Hundreds of thousands – maybe millions – of citizens who had never voted before, because they felt disenfranchised by a WASP establishment, found themselves queuing round the block to vote for a black presidential candidate. Well, you might say, those people will vote again and so he’ll be safely returned. But will they vote?

A big issue for Obama's second term will be the USA's response to the economic power of China

For many, I surmise, nothing much has been changed by four years of Obama. The president has very properly governed on behalf of all the citizenry and so, in the longest recession in living memory, few of those who already didn’t have much have added to their store. Many of them will not be motivated to vote as they were four years ago and many of them will reason that they made their great gesture then and they don’t need to repeat it. The glass ceiling has been broken and, had he not ruled himself out by self-inflicted damage, Herman Cain might have been the Republican candidate.

The Democrats have several causes for hope, however. One is the streamlined organisation on the ground that got the vote out so overwhelmingly last time. Re-election as an operation has been planned and fine-tuned ceaselessly for at least two years, a time during which the Republicans have frequently been all over the place. Another is that incumbency is certainly an advantage. Those presidents who failed to be re-elected – Ford, Carter, Bush Sr – were held in low esteem by their own parties, let alone their opponents, and the rival candidates in each case offered a credible new start. And Hurricane Sandy has been as good an “October surprise” as any incumbent could wish, allowing him to be and to appear responsive and decisive: at any rate, the storm is certainly not about to cost Obama any votes, unless he fumbles something in this last week of campaigning.

Opinion poll trackers like The New York Times and The Huffington Post have never shown any serious doubt that Obama would prevail. But opinion pollsters can be very wrong: as I frequently remind my readers, I was unable to stay up for the 2004 elections and retired to bed with Bob Worcester’s confident “calling it” for John Kerry ringing in my ears. So I do genuinely fear that the unprincipled puppet may yet make it to the White House, buoyed by the unspoken racism of vast tracts of the supposedly god-fearing electorate. But I cling to the audacity of hope.