Like many other people across Europe and around the world, I stayed up all night last Tuesday to watch the results of the US elections. Barack Obama‘s landslide victory was thrilling to watch; the first black President (elect) in a country that had been riven with seemingly insurmountable racial prejudice only a few decades ago. This was history in the making.
And yet, in spite of all the tears and declarations of tectonic shifts in the Western political landscape, I found that one of the most striking and moving moments of the night was, in fact, Senator John McCain‘s concession speech.
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McCain was incredibly gracious and well-spoken. He radiated nobility in the face of crushing defeat. He had the air of a wise old man who, happy that he had been given “a fair hearing” by the American people, accepted his loss with admirable grace and magnanimity.
And yet, what was most surprising, to me at least, was that McCain seemed utterly different from the man we had watched in the Presidential debates and almost all of the media coverage of the electoral race. Indeed, up until Tuesday night, McCain appeared a man bent on employing lowbrow tactics, both in terms of how he addressed the public and attacked his rival.
Both he and (especially) Sarah Palin seemed to use every available opportunity to speak to their public in base terms, employing verbiage of the lowest common denominator rather than properly addressing the relevant issues. In the debates, for example, McCain’s speech was peppered with platitudes; he preceded almost every statement with the words “My friends”, inserted the words “America” and “this great country” repeatedly into sentences where they really had no place, and pinned the addendum “I can fix this problem” onto many points – without having delineated just how he was going to fix that problem.
Sarah Palin’s contentions were even more base; she simply echoed all of the above (adding in “Doggone it” and “Say it ain’t so, Joe!”) while propagating her image as an all-American hockey mom. The lowest point in her debate with Senator Biden had to be when she did a “shout-out” to all the kids in Gladys Wood Elementary school:
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This type of coarse appeal to middle-America had no place in the current political climate, where international crises like the war in Iraq and the global economic meltdown need to be dealt with effectively.
It seemed to me that this approach was a callous ploy on the part of Republican party. They knew, 100%, that a electoral campaign based on honest debate on economic and foreign policy issues was virtually unwinnable. After all, it was eight years of Dubya and GOP policies that had brought America to its knees and added 4 Trillion dollars to the national debt – almost doubling it in just two Presidential terms (In fact, the National Debt Clock in Manhattan recently had have another digit added to it to accommodate the new 10 Trillion figure).
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So, the Republicans decided to argue their case using as little actual data as possible and as many rabble-rousing cliches and platitudes as they could. Also, though they denied playing “the race card”, it’s obvious that it was in fact played many times over, though tacitly so. Pointing out Obama’s highly tenuous link to ex-radical Bill Ayers, the Republicans seized the opportunity to use the word “terrorist” and associate it repeatedly with their rival. This played right into the hands of the many less-informed people who, astonishingly, actually believed that Obama may secretly have been a Muslim.
Soon after that, Obama made the mistake of explaining to supposed everyman Joe the Plumber that he would “spread the wealth around”:
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While this may seem an ostensibly innocuous statement (and even praiseworthy, considering the massive divide between affluence and poverty in Western economies), the Republicans took it and ran with it. Obama was now a Communist Muslim (It brought to mind that episode of the Simpsons where McBain has to defend America from the Commie Nazis). In fact, the highlight of the entire electoral campaign for me was Vice-President elect Joe Biden’s reaction when a right-wing interviewer accused Obama of Marxism outright:
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The thing is, all of these silly attacks and lowbrow wooing of the Bible-Belt seemed to come as second nature to Sarah Palin; she dove into slandering her rivals with aplomb. But McCain never looked entirely comfortable with this approach. During the debates he appeared tense and uptight, and rarely did he achieve the verbal ease of the man onstage with him. He seemed like a fish out of water.
And indeed, even a cursory glance at the man’s record appears to confirm that he may not have been at all suited to the party line he was pushing. A few weeks ago, I watched two excellent documentaries: Taxi To The Dark Side and Shut Up And Sing. Both films looked at contemporary US issues; the former, imprisonment and torture of terrorist suspects and the latter, censorship in the media. Incredibly, John McCain featured in both of them. Even more incredibly, he was a hero in both films. In particular, in Shut Up And Sing, he attacked the the monopoly of radio stations who had refused to play the Dixie Chicks’ music after they had famously spoken out against George W Bush.
In doing so, he seemed to be railing against the mindless, reactionary intolerance that yet exists within certain American cultural strata; people who would go out and actually destroy the artistic work of (and in a few cases, threaten to kill) anyone who dared question a war that seemed to have no valid basis – or the President who had instigated it.
This was the true Maverick John McCain; defender of free speech.
So where did that guy go?
It seems to me that for the duration of the electoral campaign at least, he was railroaded by the pressures of the Republican party. He had to put his most honest convictions aside and take the path of least resistance in order to garner votes. He had to play up the mores and vapid adages of the Middlest of Middle America. He had to play the numbers game. But I’m not sure his heart was in it.
The warmth, humility and compassion of his concession speech showed that McCain is nothing like the frustrated old man we saw in the debates. He is an intelligent and highly skilled man, and probably would have made a good President. But America (and the world) wanted change – which is precisely what the Democratic campaign promised. And based on Obama’s stunning intellectual ability and keen awareness of global issues, I think it’s safe to say that he will be, at the very least, an extremely capable leader.
But the other great thing about Obama’s victory is that it demonstrates that America does not make its decisions based solely on trashy axioms and insults. The bible-bashing, “I can kill ‘cos in God I trust” brigade will not always win out, in spite of pandering to their huge numbers in the most shameless fashion. All of the cries of Muslim, Terrorist, Communist etc, seemed to have little or no impact; if anything, they were perceived as invidious by most and actually hurt the McCain/Palin ticket. The exploitation of ignorance and fear is an incredibly powerful political tool – but in this election, even its extensive use has proven ultimately futile.
And in terms of milestones for the new century, that’s almost up there with the election of the first African-American to the White House.
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policy, the sympathetic media outlets pump up the scare tactics to justify the government’s actions. The occupation of Iraq has fallen out of favour in the US mainstream news. The administration is seeking to divert attention from the horrible mess they have created there by finding a new terrorist threat right next door! The verbal fireworks of warmongering are again being used to suggest a Manichean, black and white situation: You are either with us or against us in your opinions about policing the world; you either support good or evil.
Shaun O Connor 