Hat-tip to GuyFawkes for making me aware of this excellent article by in the Guardian. Jonathan Raban, an Ex-pat Brit living in Seattle, talks insightfully about the American political scene, describing, for instance the Republican party as "like an Italian coalition government on the brink of collapse." But his primary focus in this piece is on the Democrats who, while "one can barely slide a cigarette paper between Clinton’s and Obama’s
healthcare proposals, their schemes for juicing up the economy, or
their depressingly threadbare plans for getting out of the morass of
Iraq," have fissures that split them in other ways terribly damaging. He’s sympathetic to Obama, but sees his crusade to stitch together all these fragments as quixotic:
The Democrats I know are currently
pumped up by Obama’s unexpectedly lavish win in South Carolina and his
endorsement by Edward Kennedy, but that mood is unlikely to last.
Though better for Obama than it was forecast to be, the South Carolina
result, in which 80% of black voters supported him and 75% of whites
supported a white candidate, is hard to interpret as a triumphant break
with the old, bad "identity politics" of the past. Underneath the
weekend euphoria is the pessimistic conviction that a candidate who
really could win in November is going to lose out, by slow and painful
degrees, punctuated with occasional Iowas and South Carolinas, to a
candidate whose eventual nomination will give heart to Republicans
across the land. Obama is like the physician who is felled by the very
disease he was trying to cure: having promised to heal America’s
festering divisions, he is in danger of being swallowed by them, as
they yawn within his own party, brown against black, black against
white, female against male, Jew against gentile, not to mention old
against young, and blue-collar workers against "highly educated
professionals" (as the pollsters say). The basic demographics of the
party are still in his disfavour, even though the demographics of the
country at large suit him very well. And John Edwards’ exit from the
primaries seems unlikely to help Obama in his so far failing quest to
enlist the votes of white, blue-collar males – a constituency that has
until now been split between Clinton and Edwards.When not
preaching his exhilarating sermon of unity at rallies of the faithful,
in interviews and town meetings, Obama has shown an intellectual’s
taste for ironic paradox – dangerous in a politician, as his remark
about Reagan proved. On the evening of February 5, I fear he’s going to
need as much of that useful faculty as he can command, but I’d love to
be proved wrong.
He’s more pessimistic than I am, even though I agree with him that last week’s S.C. primary victory was a formula for national defeat. I’m more optimistic a week later because I see Obama growing in so many different ways, while it looks as though Hillary has peaked. This race has not stablized, and I see it moving in Obama’s direction. All he has to do is come in a close second on Tuesday. I think otherwise time is on his side.
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