Obama’s Date with Destiny
November 4th, 2008OBAMA : As we hope for the best, let us prepare for the nightmare scenario too
If the rest of the world had a vote in the US elections on Tuesday November 4, it would be a walkover for Senator Barrack Obama the Democratic Party candidate, over his ageing Republican opponent, Senator John McCain. But we do not have a single vote; therefore regardless of our wishes, desires, great expectations, adulation bordering on hero worship of this charismatic candidate, his fate will be decided by American voters. And rightly so.OBAMA’s date with destiny
Every country and peoples must freely choose their own leaders. If only successive US administrations, Western governments, and more outrageously the outgoing environment destroying Mr Bush’s regime, recognised the same right to other peoples of the world, maybe our interest in the US election would not be this obsessive. It is true that as the lone, even if rapidly declining, superpower, whatever happens in America and the wisdom or lack thereof of American voters, has consequences for the rest of the world. Bush’s eight year misrule ending by the law of Karma, in the global financial crisis, has made the world even keener on the US election. A bad choice will not just be bad for America, but catastrophic for the world. We cannot afford to be indifferent. The choice is also very clear: we cannot afford to be ‘undecided’. Or neutral.
Like the majority of people in the world, regardless of initial doubts, Obama has gained my confidence, which unfortunately I cannot transform into a vote cast for him. Opinion polls give him the lead, (despite a few rogue ones suggesting a ‘late McCain surge’) and are predicting victory for Obama, even if some are still insisting the contest remains very close.
So why am I still apprehensive? The last time I was greatly involved in an election in the West was in 1992 in the UK. Having spent all of my years in Britain under Conservative rule in Thatcher’s reactionary counter-revolution with her dogmatic US soulmate, Cowboy Reagan, in Washington, it seemed that Britain was ready for change. Neil Kinnock and the Labour Party were poised for victory. All the opinion polls indicated that the conservatives, in spite of replacing divisive Thatcher with a less colourful, but more ‘ordinary’ leader, John Major, had passed their ‘sell-by’ date and the Labour Party was indeed ready for power.
Come Election Day, pollsters and pundits had eggs and tomatoes on their faces. I, along with other comrades from our magazine at the time – Africa World Review (based near Borough High Street), including Napoleon Abdulai, Nyeya Yen, Bayo Olukoshi and Kayode Fayemi, went to the Walworth Road headquarters of the Labour Party after midnight, to hear an emotional Neil Kinnock with top labour leaders and his wife Glennys by his side, concede defeat in a broken voice. What was to be a victory party became a wake. We were all downcast and painfully fatigued, like the tragedy of a woman who had had a stillborn baby. As any mother will tell you, delivering a baby is very painful; it is the joy of holding the little bundle that makes a woman able to deal with the pain. With stillbirths, you suffer the pain without the bundle of joy to help you bear it.
From then on, I steeled myself against getting too excited by Western elections and getting carried away by their opinion polls. The day after Major’s victory, at least in London, it was difficult to get anyone to admit that they voted ‘Conser’. Pundits recovered from their deflated figures and began to outdo each other in looking at last-minute surges, the late mobilisation of the suburban Tories, labour triumphalism inducing complacency among their voters and hostility from the’ undecided’. Is it not eerily familiar?
The Kinnock experience has subconsciously inured me from being too excited by the potential Obama victory. It was brought to the fore again last Saturday when I went for lunch with a friend to the home of a wonderful couple who have been my surrogate family for many years. The Professor is a very deep and reflective person who has an incredible capacity to listen. The wife is more outspoken and her temperament is more synergetic with my militant disposition. But Professor in his usual cool and calm way forced me to confront my Kinnock ghost when he told us that he was resigned to an Obama defeat. Both my friend and I immediately reacted saying ‘No, it is not possible!’. But the thought has not escaped my mind since then.
We have to be sober about it. Opinion polls in America are no more scientific than those in Africa. Post-Florida, we should expect and be prepared for anything. Also, the fact that the economy is bad is not enough to guarantee a victory. Kinnock lost when the economy was bad in Britain, while Tony Blair won a landslide when the economy appeared to be on the up. Bush won two consecutive elections against common sense and decency. Both of them won against better candidates including even in their own party nominations. The first ‘victory’ was in contrived circumstances that should have stopped American diplomats and governments from ever giving lectures to any other country about fair elections. The second he won because he had frightened ordinary Americans enough to think that the same man who was not watching while they were being attacked, was the same man to shield them against future threats.
An Obama victory will make America lovable for the rest of the world on the cheap, whereas a McCain victory will mean that Americans really do not care about what our views are. Why should we then always bother ourselves with what they think?
Obama also offers hope for America to start internal healing, without which, coming to terms with the rest of the world is impossible. He is the real expression of the ‘American dream’ and has energised and mobilised decent Americans, the young, the under classes and the marginalised, left behind and trampled on by the system. If he loses, the hope he represented would be dashed internally and the expectations of the rest of the world along with it. America will have lost an opportunity for both internal and external redemption.
For their sake and ours, I hope American voters vote for Obama and for a potentially hopeful future. Should they vote otherwise, they will confirm to themselves and leave the rest of us in no doubt, that the American dream of a melting pot society open to all has always been an ideological construct hiding a nightmare.
I am very hopeful that Obama will win, but I am not aggravating my blood pressure by ignoring the possibility of the dreadful alternative of a McCain/Palin nightmare scenario.
Democratic voters need to learn from past mistakes, not be complacent and get out in droves in all states to every polling station and vote. It is not over until it is really over. This is one election in which every vote counts.
To our distant Cousin Obama: may your multiple ancestors be with you, guide you and your supporters to victory today and watch over you to implement the mandate for change we may all come to believe in.