Obama as McGovern?

You are a Democrat on the brink of your party's Presidential nomination, as long as you can calm down any late fears about electability. Which previous Democratic Presidential nominees would you be keenest to avoid being compared to?

I would suggest, in reverse order ...

5. Adlai Stevenson
4. John Kerry
3. Walter Mondale
2. Michael Dukakis
1. George McGovern

This is a pretty competitive race. I've let Adlai Stevenson pip Al Gore for the final spot. Stevenson lost twice. And, whatever the weaknesses of his campaign, Gore won. Sort of. Hubert Humphrey has faded from the frame.

EJ Dionne was worrying about whether Obama resembles Adlai Stevenson on Tuesday. Now John Judis asks if he has something of the McGovern factor.

if you look at Obama's vote in Pennsylvania, you begin to see the outlines of the old George McGovern coalition that haunted the Democrats during the '70s and '80s, led by college students and minorities.

Is Obama turning from a candidate with the ability to transcend the usual electoral blocs into a classic latte liberal insurgency Democrat?

Jonathan Chait has fired off a response to Judis, the most important point of which is that "Extrapolating from primary dynamics to general election dynamics is very dicey business".

However, it was not a good idea for Obama's campaign strategist David Axelrod to make a similar point in a way which could sound as though the campaign is conceding the white working-class vote to John McCain.

The white working class has gone to the Republican nominee for many elections, going back even to the Clinton years. This is not new that Democratic candidates don’t rely solely on these votes

Jay Cost's analysis suggests that Hillary Clinton's Pennsylvanian numbers don't change the voting dynamics enough from previous primaries. Still, the victory gives Clinton the opportunity of gaining momentum. The TV news narrative is about who won and who lost, rather than the expectations benchmarks of inside the beltway. That could make some difference in the next primaries. But she is some way short of giving the super-delegates reasonable cause to change the result.

Clinton's problem is that probably means turning up the volume again. But the charge that she went too negative in Pennsylvania was not confined to the media, and seems to have cost her votes.

The Clinton-supporting New York Times editorial page criticism of her 'low road to victory captures the fears of many Democrats that the last few weeks have made both candidates less attractive:

Voters are getting tired of it; it is demeaning the political process; and it does not work. It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election.

There was a fascinating set of interviews with the 'white house losers' - including Dukakis, Mondale and McGovern - in the Guardian's Weekend magazine at the end of last month. The next month may have a crucial impact on whether Obama can avoid joining their 'misery circle'.

Organising the movement

One of the themes of the Democrat primary has been 'the movement against the machine'. A Time Magazine piece back in the Ohio primary did a good job at capturing the two campaigns different philosophies about the politics of organisation.

The Obama method involves giving away the tools for supporters to campaign for him. For the conventional campaign, this means a significant loss of control. But the gain to Obama has been clear - in his fundraising advantage, his ability to engage and mobilise new voters, and his striking victories in each of the caucus states.

But it would be a mistake to think that the politics of inspiration and engagement does not need organising too, as Noam Scheiber's fascinating profile profile of Obama's campaign manager David Plouffe shows.

The marathon continues

It's something of a relief that the voters are finally getting another say in the Pennsylvania primary. The six weeks since the last primary have not been good for the Democrats, as the race has got more negative, and more trivial (not helped by the much critcised ABC candidates' debate)

Obama has firmed up as favourite for the nomination. But the long slog has exposed some weaknesses: his 'bitter' comments could prove a storm in a teacup or, in retrospect, seem like a clear clue about a Dukakis or Kerry style weakness. (EJ Dionne puts it well in a column asking whether Obama is JFK or Adlai Stevenson, or perhaps both. (It is an interesting contrast to today's politics of self-destruction to think that the Democrats ran the same candidate twice against Eisenhower).

Hillary Clinton is expected to win tonight. But the expectations game has her needing something like a 10 point victory. A race where she is favourite is more dangerous for her, since her campaign depends on achieving an 'away win' - overturning the odds in a state which Obama would have won - both to try to catch up on the popular vote, or put the issue in doubt for the super-delegates.

Obama seems to have weathered the storms without looking like imploding.

The excellent Jay Cost looks at the conventional wisdom and challenges some of it, defending Hillary Clinton's decision to stay in until the buzzer sounds.

Globe and Mail: The waiting game

As Gordon Brown prepares to head to the United States, Doug Saunders in Canada's leading quality newspaper, The Globe and Mail, says a good deal of international diplomacy is on hold in an analysis piece published on Saturday.

Around the world, Jan. 21, 2009, has become the key date in politics. Diplomats and senior officials in a half-dozen countries have told me frankly that little of any significance is going to happen until that fateful Wednesday when either Hillary Clinton, John McCain or Barack Obama is inaugurated into office.

I am among the various think-tankers quoted in the piece - and there's even a plug for this modest blog.

"I think everyone's agreed that there is not going to be a literal Love, Actually moment — though there are certainly lots of people at Number 10 who would like to see that — but there is a real sense in this government that many important items on the international agenda are just going to have to wait until after Jan. 21," says Sunder Katwala, head of the Fabian Society, a venerable think tank with very close ties to the Brown administration (and keeper of a blog titled "Life after Bush").

How (not) to get a British Obama

The Obama effect is being claimed by both sides of the debate about whether political parties should introduce all black shortlists for some parliamentary seats.

Harriet Harman has commissioned the pressure group Operation Black Vote to report on how the scheme would work. The report has not been published, but an accurate summary of the main proposals
was published in The Observer last month. Simon Woolley of Operation Black Vote told The Observer that:

Unless we take positive action measures we are not going to have a representative democracy for more than 75 years. It's not that we don't have Obamas, but we don't have the mechanisms for them to see the light of day.'

In a commentary in this week's New Statesman, I argued against the proposals as a regressive step, arguing that "ethnic faces for ethnic voters" would be a big step backwards - and the opposite of the Obama effect.

The Independent reported reaction from several MPs, and the criticism from several Asian MPs has been picked up by the Times of India.

Sunny Hundal on Comment is Free and Kanishk Tharoor on OurKingdom agree with me about the dangers of this approach.

Simon Woolley of the Operation Black Vote makes the case for all black shortlists on Comment is Free. In the Independent, Diane Abbott believes that critics are being 'both silly and selfish' and seeking to kick away the ladder from everybody else, and is reluctant to believe that anybody could have a different view. I don't think the claim that it would take 75 years to achieve fair representation stands up, and had a short letter published in response.

Clearly, it is a debate which will continue. Two thoughts about the reaction:

The claim that the division is between Afro-Caribbean and Asian MPs is not the whole story. The reaction does suggest that is one factor. But two of the most senior Asian MPs Keith Vaz and Virendra Sharma back all-black shortlists, while Chuka Umunna, recently selected in Streatham, is a sceptic. So this could equally be seen as a generational division. Those born before 1970 are more likely to be in favour; those born afterwards to be against. And MPs with high numbers of black and Asian voters are more likely to be in favour; those in seats which are predominantly white are opposed.

And, while Labour's black and Asian MPs are almost equally divided, this should not be a debate about minorities, among minorities.

I think we need to look at ethnicity, gender and class cohesively, and will be doing more work on this.

Five years on: the death of liberal internationalism?

There has been an avalanche of commentary and analysis on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war. Back in 2003, I was working for The Observer, which very controversially supported the war, primarily on liberal humanitarian intervention grounds against Saddam's regime.

A thoughtful five years on editorial last Sunday is probably as close as the paper is going to come to admitting that this was a mistake.

Terrible miscalculations were made in the preparation for war and a catalogue of blunders made in its prosecution. As an
intervention, whether for moral or strategic goals, it failed. The consequences are grave, and not just for Iraq.

The 2003 decision to back the war of recently departed Observer editor Roger Alton is lambasted in Nick Davies' Flat Earth News. However, Davies charge which is essentially that Alton turned the Observer into a pro-war propaganda sheet, simply ignores both the way in which both its reporting and commentary gave a great deal of space was also given to anti-war analysis and arguments, with columnists including Mary Riddell and Will Hutton arguing just as stridently against the war as David Aaronovitch and Nick Cohen were arguing for it, while external critics including Terry Jones, Dilip Hiro and John Pilger also wrote scathingly about Blair and Bush for the paper. (It is interesting that Nick Cohen became the fiercest critic of left opponents of the war, many people forget that he took that position himself against the Afghanistan war, and argued against the Iraq war, before he was for it).

I am looking back on that now because that debate which raged inside the Observer reflected the way in which liberal-left thinking about foreign policy and intervention had shifted after 1989, largely in response to Bosnia and Rwanda.

The Observer on Sunday asked:

It is a blow to the idea of 'liberal intervention'. But does that blow have to be fatal?

For me, this is a central question. Can we learn from the mistakes of the Iraq war without forgetting the lessons of Bosnia and Rwanda?

Richard Norton-Taylor, as part of his extensive series reviewing the Iraq legacy for the Guardian, notes the retreat from intervention and asks if

Would there have been a consensus to intervene in the humanitarian disaster of Darfur, had Iraq not been invaded?

At the Fabian conference, John Kampfner accurately diagnosed liberal internationalism as at its weakest point for two decades. Andrew Grice makes a similar point in his column reviewing the Iraq inheritance this morning:

The other casualty of Iraq is the noble cause of liberal interventionism against evil regimes. Supporters expressed the hope this week that events in Iraq would not make it less likely to happen in future. I hope they are right, but fear they are wrong.

Still, a rescue, however difficult, is also necessary.

I argue in a Comment is Free commentary that a any rescue must also involved recasting liberal internationalism.

Rescuing liberal internationalism requires what Blair never offered: a much clearer analysis of where it should differ deeply from the neocon project.

This should be a central project for creating the 'after Bush' agenda we need.

Learning the lessons would create a different, humbler agenda. But if we have to accept that the neocon embrace has killed off liberal internationalism for good then it will prove impossible to replace Bush's unilateralism with the "new multilateralism" we need.

Obama in Philadelphia

This is Obama's time of greatest peril in the primary race. Though he trails heavily in the last big contest in Philadelphia, Obama is all but uncatchable in pledged delegates and should be able to hold on to his popular vote lead too. The nomination is definitely his to lose. But that means a month, without a run of electoral contests to punctuate the campaign, where the overriding question is his viability as a General Election nominee.

Hillary Clinton has (only) performed well when the underdog. Twice - before New Hampshire, and before Texas - voters decided against crowning Obama, instead keeping the contest going. Now, the last hope of the Clinton campaign is an Obama implosion, sufficient to give super-delegates cause to put the nomination back in play at the convention. And Obama has had to address the issues - the Rezko relationship and Reverend Jeremiah Wright's 'God damn America' comments (video) - which could derail the candidacy, or (perhaps just as damaging) turn him into just another politician.

So today's Philadelphia speech (which is well worth watching in full: video; full text) mattered a great deal. Obama's response to a potential campaign crisis is being called bold and unconventional. Yet it was also entirely predictable. Obama could do no other. And that helps to explain why he got it so right.

It was good for Obama to be able to deepen the campaign message beyond the 'change' and 'hope' slogans; and to make sure his audience understood that the aspiration to a post-racial politics and society will be much more complicated than wishing it were so, but no less noble an ambition for that.

Obama's candidacy has been too much, too often discussed through the prism of race. That is inevitable. I have done it myself. But this has led to something of a tendency to patronise and underestimate Obama: because he will symbolise change, he can not hope to do more than that. Perhaps, that would be how it ended: that his Presidential campaign would prove the high point, of hopes promised but never fulfilled. But let us hold on to the possibility too that he could make much more use of the bully pulpit than that.

I can flinch at his appeal to 'unity'. Despite its rhetorical flight, Obama's breakthrough 2004 convention speech flirts a little too much with the anti-political zeitgeist for my tastes. Yet I am increasingly convinced that Obama is doing something more nuanced and more complicated and - crucially - that he will be able to engage his audience of this. Today's speech was strongest on the need to build coalitions for social justice - and, moreover, coalitions which recognise that grievances can be real, and yet still compete with others which may have no less validity.

For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances - for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs - to the larger aspirations of all Americans - the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man whose been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family

.... In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds - by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations.

Progressive politics has space to breathe only when it can bind these together so that coalitions for change defeat a battle of competitive grievances. Ever since the passage of the civil rights act, dividers have had better tunes than uniters. Obama is often accused of naivety. But there is a central strategic logic to an argument about how to call time on the politics of Nixon's piano strategy, of Lee Atwater and Willie Horton, of Dubya and Karl Rove. Progressives have been consistently outmanouvered by the mobilisation of white grievance politics.

I think Obama would, if President, be more likely than any President since LBJ to start a national debate about class disadvantage and the American dream. (Though the post-LBJ competition is not so strong). The interaction between class and race was a key theme of today's speech, albeit in a minor key.

Again, it is worth acknowledging that this language that pledges that "It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams" could be empty or substantive. The least conventional part of today's speech was Obama's explanation of Wright's anger. I can't imagine his campaign advisers were so keen on this, yet it added a depth and truth which the conventional politics of distancing and moving on would not have done.

For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.

And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.

What Obama again demonstrates here is that he has an unusual ability to empathise with those with whom he does not agree. (Normally, that extends to conservatives; today, more riskily, to his left). This talent offers the opportunity to offer his audience a defence of democratic politics itself and the opportunity to participate in it. The quest for consensus is not simply for consensus' sake. There was an excellent description of this in a response to George Packer's New Yorker blog.

His instincts are not confrontational, but rather dialogic. It’s not so much that he seeks consensus (although he does) as that he seeks to instill a commitment and desire for some solution to, or resolution of, a problem which the group now “owns.” Perhaps more significantly, Obama tries to get people to recognize that they will not succeed in achieving all of their policy goals, that not all solutions or resolutions will satisfy everyone, and that we can accept solutions with which we strongly disagree, so long as we are heard and respected in the political process.

The Wright-Obama contrast also animates Shelby Steele's analysis of 'challenger' and 'bargainer' strategies on race. Yet Steele has got Obama wrong. Steele wrote (again) in today's Washington Post that:

No matter his ultimate political fate, there is already enough pathos in Barack Obama to make him a cautionary tale. His public persona thrives on a manipulation of whites (bargaining), and his private sense of racial identity demands both self-betrayal and duplicity. His is the story of a man who flew so high, yet neglected to become himself.

But this charge of opportunism, of cynicism, is misplaced. Obama is himself. Reading Obama's Dreams of My Father, published thirteen years ago, I was struck by the authenticity of his personal journey, how he reconciles himself to his family history, to being black and mixed race, how he is attracted by a range of different ways of dealing or not dealing with race, and how he comes to forge a sense of self and a set of views which are very directly reflected in his campaign message over a decade later.

That rootednesss lies behind the most impressive thing about this rookie campaign: how Obama has consistently turned every challenge and attack into a chance to reaffirm, to strengthen the core, consistent message of his campaign.

It was because today's speech rang true in its claim to be bigger than the politics of a presidential campaign that it will probably turn out to be good political strategy and tactics too. (Contrast Bill Clinton's 1992 challenge to Sister Souljah: he was right, and it was good politics, but how transparently tactically driven that was).

I've been consistently stressing that that this race isn't over. (Before Ohio and Texas, I was prepared to offer Obama the garlands of having won the campaign; but not the nomination).

But I feel ready to stick my neck out now. In two or three days time, I expect the conventional wisdom will be that this Philadelphia speech was the moment when it became clear that Obama had clinched the nomination. And - this time, just for once in this campaign year - I think the commentariat are going to turn out to be right.