Thesun 2008-11-06 Page21 The Upstart With A Dream 2

theSun

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| THURSDAY NOVEMBER 6 2008

INTERVIEWS VIEWS

politician who had never benefited from the patronage of a political machine, he knew how to operate on a shoestring. It was also Obama’s good fortune that Bush’s eight-year term proved such a disaster. By opposing the Iraq war, well before the 2003 invasion, Obama got on the right side of history and sowed the seeds for a robust but thoughtful foreign policy. “I am not opposed to all wars. I am opposed to dumb wars,” he said in autumn 2002, a position which enabled him to outflank even Republicans by calling for stepped-up military action in Afghanistan and even against al-Qaeda inside Pakistan. None of this seemed decisive, however, when all six Democratic candidates rolled into Des Moines, Iowa, on a bitterly cold night early last November to attend the Jefferson Jackson Dinner. The national media was mostly absent as 9,000 raucous supporters – most wearing Obama’s “Change” T-shirts, packed a boxing arena to watch Democratic big shots arrayed around a centre stage tuck into dinner. The Clinton campaign dismissed the enthusiasm of the youthful Obama fans, saying they had all been bussed in from Chicago for the night. It was a fateful error of judgment, by a campaign that already reeked of a sense of entitlement. Because the “JJ dinner” as Democratic insiders call it, would turn out to be a game-changer. The first five would-be candidates rattled through their stump speeches. Obama was last to speak. Deadlines had already passed for television news and most newspapers. People were already leaving the hall. But the first-term Senator from Illinois sprinted on to the stage and gave a barnstorming speech. His supporters were delighted, but crucially, so were potential big-money backers, who saw for the first time that he could throw a punch. The Iraq war, “should have never been authorised and should have never been waged,” Obama said. “We have a chance to bring the country together to tackle problems that Bush made far worse, and that festered long before he took office.” That was an implied criticism of Bill Clinton, then still revered by most of the party, but his next words dealt a stinging blow to Mrs Clinton’s candidacy. “When I am the nominee of this party,” said Obama, “the Republican nominee will not be able to say I voted for the war in Iraq, or that I gave Bush the benefit of the doubt on Iran, or that I support BushCheney policies of not talking to leaders that we don’t like.” The only headline that mattered next day was in the Des Moines Register. David Yepsen, the paper’s influential political editor, lavished praise on his speech and predicted an instant buzz across Iowa, where the first contest of the 2008 election would be held in eight

ahead new president can wave to magic this situation away. We are where we are. One of the problems he faces will be the expectation that a new administration can make a swift and material difference to economic prospects. Policies can be helpful or perverse and had the US banking system been allowed to collapse that would have been profoundly perverse. But even helpful policies take time to have effect. Fortunately, economies are self-healing. While 2009 does look very difficult for the US economy, with most predictions suggesting it will shrink overall, there are solid hopes for a recovery in 2010. At some stage US house prices will bottom out and start to rise again, and at some stage the banks will be recapitalised and confident to resume lending. There will be a recovery and it will take place during the life of the incoming administration. But there is something else. For the past 15 or so years the US economy has increasingly

weeks. “Should he come from behind to win the Iowa caucuses,” he wrote, “Saturday’s dinner will be remembered as one of the turning-points in his campaign here.” A month later, 18,000 people gave up their Saturday afternoon to drive through the snow and ice to Des Moines to watch Oprah Winfrey endorse the Obama bid and listen to hours of political rhetoric. As David Broder, the veteran political writer of The Washington Post wrote this week, “In the eight Iowa caucus campaigns I’d covered over four decades, I’d never seen anything like this. In fact I’d not seen voters so turned on since my first campaign as a political reporter, the classic Kennedy-Nixon race of 1960.”

Hampshire, setting the scene for a long and bruising campaign that went on for almost six months, he was not fazed. When his controversial pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, was exposed as a virulent anti-white demagogue, he delivered what many said was the most historically sophisticated speech on race relations since the death of Martin Luther King. Some of the mishaps were of his own making. Condescending remarks he made about working class white voters “clinging to guns and religion” were a gift to his opponents, and even though he secured the Democratic nomination, he was polling 20 and 30 percentage points behind John McCain in must-win states like Ohio. McCain’s campaign was not slow to sow In the eight Iowa caucus campaigns I’d covered doubt about the first over four decades, I’d never seen anything like black major-party this. In fact I’d not seen voters so turned on since candidate for president, my first campaign as a political reporter, the classic with millions of socalled robocalls telling Kennedy-Nixon race of 1960.” targeted voters that Obama has never been short of ambition, like Osama, he had plotted with a domestic but as recently as 2004 he was unknown terrorist, Bill Ayers, who tried to bomb the outside Illinois. Although by then he had Pentagon. In fact he had served on the board spent eight years in the state senate, a brash of an education charity with Ayers, who attempt to win a safe Democratic seat in later became a Chicago University education Congress ended in humiliation when he professor, but the smears had some impact. was badly beaten by a former Black Panther Obama’s most grievous error followed named Bobby Rush. He was still teaching at Russia’s invasion of Georgia in August, which the University of Chicago Law School, and McCain exploited ruthlessly. Obama’s failure was up to his neck in student loans which to condemn Russia’s action – he blamed both he only managed to pay off in 2006. sides for the invasion – reminded voters of But John Kerry had spotted the urbane Hillary Clinton’s famous “3am phone call” young politician during his doomed advertisement in which she warned that presidential campaign against Bush, and Obama was not ready for leadership. The asked Obama to give the keynote address polls turned in McCain’s favour for the first at the 2004 Democratic Convention. His time in the race. oratory not only helped revive a party which McCain’s decision to play the wildest card at the time was directionless and adrift, it swept him into the US Senate the same year, where he soon began positioning himself for a run for the presidency. To Clinton’s backers – and not only to them – it seemed ludicrously presumptuous. But in Iowa they discovered their mistake. While she was flying an expensive “Hillacopter” around the state, Obama and his team logged tens of thousands of miles persuading rural white Iowans to back him. Through word of mouth and the efforts of his devoted followers, he won a state that is 95 per cent white. And while Clinton depended on friends in the establishment to help her through the election, Obama was busy building a grassroots movement. He turned to the Internet to raise money and used the explosion of online social networking tools to sign up and motivate an army of volunteers. Time and again during the primaries, and the election campaign, that followed, Obama showed his coolness under fire. When Clinton snatched victory in New

lived beyond its means. This shows up in the huge current account deficit, the largest proportionately and of course absolutely, of any large economy. It shows up too in a large fiscal deficit. It shows up in very low US household savings, which are at or close to zero. The US has been able to run the “borrow and borrow big” policy because other countries have been prepared to lend to it. Rationally it is bizarre that the world’s biggest economy, and the one with just about the highest standard of living, should have to borrow to keep itself going. Strategically it has been unwise to borrow so much from economic rivals such as China and somewhat unstable partners in the Middle East, because sooner or later these loans have to be paid back. Besides, it makes no longterm sense to use loans from China to fill the shopping malls with cheap tat. The US consumer ends up with rubbishy consumer products and the US ends up with huge obligations, giving China the opportunity to buy up real assets – land, office blocks, companies and so on – that had previously been owned by Americans.

If the country as a whole has been unwise so too have many individuals within it. One of the startling revelations of the past few months is the way in which Americans with no income, no assets and no credit record have been able to borrow money. Those loans are now going sour and you can argue whether this was principally the fault of the borrower or the lender. You cannot however argue that it is a great idea for families not to have any savings. You can talk about this in terms of economic numbers, that in the US the proportion of GDP that is consumed rather than invested is too high at 70 per cent. But it is not just an economic issue; it is a social issue. It is a question of whether you depend on others or do you depend on yourself. So the challenge facing the 44th president is to explain to Americans that the country needs to become less dependent on others for physical resources and more importantly financial resources. It needs to get saving again. The US economy remains huge, flexible and powerful. But it has undermined its own strength by its self-indulgence. – The Independent

of the campaign, naming Alaska’s governor Sarah Palin as his running-mate, stole all the thunder. As the presidential debates loomed, one poll gave McCain a five-point lead. It was a margin he was not to enjoy again. The sudden crisis that engulfed the financial markets dealt a fatal one-two to the Republican campaign. It reinforced the point Obama had been making all year: that the decisions of the Bush and Clinton administrations to remove regulatory oversight from Wall Street had led directly to the sub-prime mortgage crisis. The second blow was self-inflicted. McCain’s claim that the US economy was “fundamentally sound” made him a laughingstock; worse, with the economy going through convulsions, working class white voters, some 45 per cent of the electorate, began to reappraise their rejection of Obama and look past their prejudices. At his final Virginia rally, grieving for the grandmother who raised him, and who had died that morning, Obama reflected on the harsh attacks he had endured on the campaign trail. He described a grim journey he made to South Carolina, looking for an endorsement at a time when his campaign was floundering. While he was introducing himself, a small woman began interrupting with the chant, “Fired Up!” followed a moment later with “Ready To Go!” It lifted his mood that day and became the catch cry of the campaign. “That’s how this thing started,” he said, “It shows you what one voice can do. One voice can change a room, and if a voice can change a room it can change a city, and if it can change a city, it can change a state, and if it can change a state it can change a nation, and if it can change a nation, it can change the world.” – The Independent