John O'Sullivan
2/11/08 Globe & Mail (Toronto Can.) A17
 

Barring a miracle - not a trivial qualification since Mike Huckabee believes in them - Senator John McCain will be the next Republican presidential nominee. Alas, almost any Democrat is favoured to win against almost any Republican in 2008.

Democrats are raising far more money than the GOP. Turnouts for Democratic primaries and caucuses have been twice as numerous. Polls on such matters as party self-identification heavily favour the Democrats. By these tests, even if Hillary Clinton would probably be easier to beat than Barack Obama, both are so favoured to win this distinction between them hardly matters.

What does matter, therefore, is whether there is an important distinction between them in how they would govern.

Some U.S. conservatives set aside their distaste for Ms. Clinton at this point and discover unsuspected virtues in her. She is tough, competent, experienced, and centrist. But while a practical politician who is prepared to compromise, she is also a principled liberal Democrat, and she knows how government works inside out. In other words, her compromises always move the status quo a little further toward statism and regulation. And Ms. Clinton is a finished product. She will not change politically.

Barack Obama, meanwhile, is a more tentative, ambiguous and even self-contradictory figure. He is running as a unifier who wants America to transcend race and ethnicity. His record of legislating has been firmly liberal on racial (as on most other) issues.

Republicans tend to discount his rhetoric while minutely examining his voting record. Usually, that is sensible, but on this occasion it may mislead.

Much of Mr. Obama is a work in progress. He is most clearly liberal on Iraq policy where he promises a 'drawdown' of U.S. troops that would be completed in 16 months. But Iraq is the issue on which American voters are most clearly liberal, and he has salted his commitments with escape-hatch phrases such as 'responsibly.' It is not hard to imagine a President Obama responding to a 'surge' in Iraqi violence by 'responsibly' stretching out the time-scale of U.S. withdrawal.

And while Mr. Obama proposes roughly the same higher tax plans as Ms. Clinton, he recognizes the need for countervailing measures to reduce what would then be a top tax rate of more than 50 per cent. His health-care plan is also cheaper than Ms. Clinton's and avoids imposing expensive mandates on workers and small employers.

It is on race and ethnicity, however, where the really revolutionary impact of an Obama victory would be felt. The mere fact of a President Obama would change both America and the world's view of America - just as the mere fact of a Polish pope undermined Soviet rule in Eastern Europe. It would demonstrate that the 'American Dream' - one of opportunity for all - is real and is being progressively realized.

It would undermine anti-Americanism abroad and the querulous politics of racial grievance at home, and perhaps launch U.S. politics on a new trajectory.

But what sort of trajectory? Despite his magnificent rhetoric, Mr. Obama has generally stuck to his party's line on racial preferences, immigration, and other issues tinged with race. At the same time, he has occasionally thrown out remarks suggesting he was unhappy with this. Thus he told George Stephanopoulos last May on television that preferences should also 'take into account white kids who have been disadvantaged '

All this suggests a deep ambivalence. How is it likely to be resolved?

In his fine study of Barack Obama, A Bound Man, author Shelby Steele traces this to a conflict within Mr. Obama's soul created by his upbringing. To oversimplify a subtle argument, Mr. Obama, in the absence of his father, sought a sense of belonging in his racial identity, joining the Black Student Society, and going along with arguments that blamed relative black poverty wholly on white racism, etc. But this quest for belonging through race afforded him little but psychological comfort - and sometimes psychological discomfort as when he assented to racist talk of 'white folks' that he knew to be false.

For Mr. Obama knew from his own life - and in his own autobiographical writings he fondly acknowledges - that his success is due to the habits of diligence, self-reliance and responsibility instilled in him by his loving mother and his (white) grandparents. These 'vigorous virtues' - as the philosopher Shirley Robin Letwin called them - are human virtues rather than racial ones.

Expressed in political terms, the contrast becomes: Should Barack Obama today urge young black people to seek advancement in racial identity, as both establishment America and the Democratic Party implicitly argue? Or should he urge them to develop the responsible virtues that have helped him to rise?

How Mr. Obama answers that question should - in logic at least - determine how he shapes policies on education, health, welfare, etc. But which answer he gives might well be shaped by how the election influences him.

If Mr. Obama is elected president - especially if by a landslide - he would undoubtedly owe his victory to the votes of crossover Republicans and independents as well as those of Democrats. He is already winning more white male votes than Hillary Clinton. And it is not fanciful to predict that he could be the first Democrat since Lyndon Johnson to win a majority of the white vote.

Political calculation alone would mandate that he govern in such a way as to keep the good opinion of these Republicans and white Democrats. But he would also know that these voters had placed their trust in him in an unusually serious way. They would be looking to him to govern in the spirit of a colour-blind national unity and to encourage the 'vigorous virtues' in all ethnic groups. Their support would reinforce the lessons he has already begun to draw from his own life.

It would be a very cold-hearted statesman who could resist the power of such hopes - but a very brave one who would risk the storm of fulfilling them.