US ELECTION 2008

The world's verdict will be harsh if the US rejects the man it yearns for
An America that disdains Obama for his global support risks turning current anti-Bush feeling into something far worse
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* Jonathan Freedland
*
o Jonathan Freedland
o The Guardian,
o Wednesday September 10 2008
o Article history

The feeling is familiar. I had it four years ago and four years before that: a sinking feeling in the stomach. It's a kind of physical pessimism which says: "It's happening again. The Democrats are about to lose an election they should win - and it could not matter more."

In my head, I'm not as anxious for Barack Obama's chances as I was for John Kerry's in 2004 or Al Gore's in 2000. He is a better candidate than both put together, and all the empirical evidence says this year favours Democrats more than any since 1976. But still, I can't shake off the gloom.

Look at yesterday's opinion polls, which have John McCain either in a dead heat with Obama or narrowly ahead. Given the well-documented tendency of African-American candidates to perform better in polls than in elections - thanks to people who say they will vote for a black man but don't - this suggests Obama is now trailing badly. More troubling was the ABC News-Washington Post survey which found McCain ahead among white women by 53% to 41%. Two weeks ago, Obama had a 15% lead among women. There is only one explanation for that turnaround, and it was not McCain's tranquilliser of a convention speech: Obama's lead has been crushed by the Palin bounce.

So you can understand my pessimism. But it's now combined with a rising frustration. I watch as the Democrats stumble, uncertain how to take on Sarah Palin. Fight too hard, and the Republican machine, echoed by the ditto-heads in the conservative commentariat on talk radio and cable TV, will brand Democrats sexist, elitist snobs, patronising a small-town woman. Do nothing, and Palin's rise will contin

Trust a Canadian television critic to untangle the bizarre knot of American politics. In an absolutely brilliant piece in today's Globe and Mail, the paper's tv columnist John Doyle explains the Palin phenomenon as reality-tv run amok. He describes the made-for-tv spectacle as "So You Think You Can be Vice-President":

Now reality, in all its messy, crazy, funky glory, has flooded the party, in the comely, crackling form of Sarah Palin.

An online prediction market weighs in on whether VP candidate Sarah Palin will be dropped from the Republican ticket.

Can traffic to a Presidential Candidate's homepage be used to gauge who will win this year's election? Hitwise has published recent data on the traffic both American presidential candidates have seen in the last month (ending 8/23), and while the results may not shed much light on the forthcoming election's outcome, they reveal a few interesting trends.

Hillary Clinton's campaign was undone by a clash of personalities more toxic than anyone imagined. E-mails and memos-published here for the first time-reveal the backstabbing and conflicting strategies that produced an epic meltdown.

The stunning admission Edwards made to ABC's Bob Woodruff, and in a written statement from Chapel Hill on Friday afternoon, was that he's a narcissist.

Barack Obama has long been his party's presumptive nominee. Now he's becoming its presumptuous nominee.

Mashup showing breakdown of canditates' election covereage in cyberspace.

On Monday, The New Yorker magazine tried dipping its toe into broad satire involving Senator Obama with a cover image depicting the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee and his wife, Michelle, as fist-bumping, flag-burning, bin Laden-loving terrorists in the Oval Office. The response from both Democrats and Republicans was explosive.

One day in 1995, Barack Obama went to see his alderman, an influential politician named Toni Preckwinkle, on Chicago's South Side, where politics had been upended by scandal. Mel Reynolds, a local congressman, was facing charges of sexual assault of a sixteen-year-old campaign volunteer. (He eventually resigned his seat.)

Barack Obama sells the Democratic Party short. He talks about his fund-raising success as if his donors were part of a spontaneous movement of small-money enthusiasts who cohered around himself. In fact, Democrats have spent years building their donor network. Obama's fund-raising base is bigger than John Kerry's, Howard Dean's and Al Gore's, but it's not different.

Among the many dark tidings for American conservatism, there is one genuine bright spot. Over the past five years, a group of young and unpredictable rightward-leaning writers has emerged on the scene.

Let's go back and consider how the world looked in the winter of 2006-2007. Iraq was in free fall, with horrific massacres and ethnic cleansing that sent a steady stream of bad news across the world media. The American public delivered a stunning electoral judgment against the Iraq war, the Republican Party and President Bush.

God, Republicans are saps. They think that they're running against some academic liberal who wouldn't wear flag pins on his lapel, whose wife isn't proud of America and who went to some liberationist church where the pastor damned his own country. They think they're running against some naïve university-town dreamer, the second coming of Adlai Stevenson.

Unity was spared the banality of unanimity.

Carmella Lewis, with her Hillary T-shirt and Hillary placard, came all the way from Denver to make sure there would be plenty of ambiguity, duality and ferocity in Unity.