EXPLAINING THE RIDDLE
Aug 21st 2008 


The man who has called himself "a blank screen" is about to take
centre-stage

EIGHT YEARS ago Barack Obama was thoroughly humiliated at the
Democratic Convention in Los Angeles. He had recently lost a
congressional primary in Chicago, and both his political and personal
bank accounts were empty. The rental car company rejected his credit
card. He failed to get hold of a floor pass and ended up watching the
proceedings on a big screen in a car park. He returned home with his
tail between his legs before the week was out--and left the
celebrations to the people who mattered, not least the Clintons, who
took every chance to seize the limelight from the Gores.

This year Mr Obama is the Democratic convention. The Pepsi Centre in
Denver will be chock-a-block with people cheering about "hope" and
"change". On August 28th Mr Obama will deliver his acceptance speech at
a local football stadium, Invesco Field, before an audience of more
than 70,000. The man who could not get a floor pass in Los Angeles has
a better than even chance of winning the presidential election in
November--the current Intrade market odds are running 61 to 38 in his
favour--and thereby becoming America's first non-white president.

Mr Obama has gripped America's imagination, and indeed the world's,
like nobody since the last Democratic senator to win the presidency,
John Kennedy. Across the country, from freezing Iowa to
hotter-than-hell Nevada, huge armies of Americans have queued for hours
to listen to his speeches. Few have been disappointed. Mr Obama looks
too frail to bear the weight of all the expectations that have been
loaded upon him--like a gangly graduate student rather than a political
titan. But "frailty" is the last word that comes to mind when you see
him in action. One conservative compared his reaction to seeing Obama
on stage to that of the hero of "Jaws" when he sees the monstrous
shark--"We're gonna need a bigger boat."

Obamamania has inevitably produced a backlash: anti-Obama books are
currently riding high in the NEW YORK TIMES bestseller list. But his
achievement remains extraordinary. George Bush was the son of a
president and grandson of a senator. Mr Obama is the son of a Kenyan
student who abandoned young Barack when he was only two. Mr Obama
enjoyed a career which puts his born-in-the-purple predecessor to
shame: he was the first black president of the HARVARD LAW REVIEW, the
author of two good, if narcissistic, books (which, breaking the
political mould, he wrote himself) and a senator by his mid-40s. He has
thriven in post-September-11th America despite the fact that his father
was a nominal Muslim and his middle name is Hussein.

Mr Obama seized his party's nomination from the most powerful machine
in Democratic politics: a machine created by the first two-term
Democratic president since FDR and inherited by a woman who combined
the clout of an insider with the promise of becoming the first female
president in American history. (Women make up more than 50% of the
population, blacks are a mere 12%.) Mr Obama's supporters argue that he
demonstrated both judgment and character in coming out against the
hugely popular Iraq invasion. He predicted that the war would be "of
undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined
consequences". They also argue that his magnetic appeal to young people
offers his party the chance to win over an entire generation, much as
Ronald Reagan did in the 1980s.

Mr Obama thus represents extraordinary opportunities for the Democratic
Party; but there are huge risks, too. He lost a succession of big swing
states, including Pennsylvania and Ohio, during the primaries. Some of
the most important swing groups in the country remain deeply suspicious
of his arugula-flavoured politics. Exit polls show that in the primary
season Mr Obama won only about a third of Latinos, Catholics, whites
without college degrees and whites over 60. This is doubly worrying for
Democrats given the appeal of his Republican rival, John McCain, to
independents, blue-collar types and older folk. Many Americans remain
to be persuaded, and are still full of questions.

EATING SNAKE
Who is Barack Obama? The best clues to that riddle can be gleaned from
his two volumes of autobiography. He spent the first half of his life
in search of a stable identity. He looked "black". But he was the son
of a white mother from Kansas and an African, rather than an
African-American, father from Kenya. He spent four years in Indonesia,
where he attended local schools (including a Muslim one) and ate local
delicacies such as dog, grasshopper and snake, on which his stepfather
fed him. He eventually ended up living with his white grandparents in
Hawaii.

The young Obama flirted with the "blackness" of the inner-city, growing
an Afro, skimping on school work and experimenting with marijuana and a
little cocaine. But he eventually pulled himself together and joined
the American meritocracy, attending Occidental College, Columbia
University and, later, Harvard Law School.

Mr Obama found the answer to his search for identity in black Chicago.
He started his career as a "community organiser" on Chicago's South
Side, the largest black community in the country. He joined one of the
city's most prominent black churches, Trinity United, and abandoned his
youthful agnosticism in favour of Christianity (Trinity's Afrocentric
bent, with its African visitors and women dressed in African robes, may
have particularly appealed to the son of an African). He married a
black woman with deep roots on the South Side, and had his two
daughters baptised at Trinity.

The rootless cosmopolitan now had roots for the first time in his life.
But Mr Obama was determined not to be trapped by black politics. This
was partly a matter of generational change. Mr Obama is part of a new
wave of black politicians such as Michael Nutter, the mayor of
Philadelphia, and Deval Patrick, the governor of Massachusetts, who
have embraced post-racial politics. But it was also a matter of raw
ambition. "He's always wanted to be president," admits Valerie Jarrett,
one of his closest advisers. Mr Obama realised that his post-racial
identity was a golden ticket to the White House.

Personality partly explains how he has risen so far, so fast. But he
has also enjoyed a charmed political career. His Republican opponent
for the Illinois Senate seat, Jack Ryan, self-destructed when it was
revealed that he forced his wife to attend sex clubs "with cages, whips
and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling". Mr Ryan's replacement
was one of the standing jokes of American politics, Alan Keyes. "All I
had to do was keep my mouth shut", Mr Obama confessed, "and start
planning my swearing-in ceremony."

There remains a mystery about his politics. David Mundell, his most
thorough biographer, refers to his "ingenious lack of specificity". One
Democratic activist has called him "a kind of human Rorschach test". Mr
Obama himself confesses that "I serve as a blank screen on which people
of vastly different stripes project their own views. As such, I am
bound to disappoint some, if not all, of them."

So what does Mr Obama stand for? There are two well-rehearsed answers
to the first question--one popular with his supporters, one popular
with his opponents. Both are wrong.

The pro-Obama answer is that the young senator is a reformer without
parallel, a change-maker and mould-breaker. Mr Obama's campaign has
been based on the twin promises of "change" and "hope". The American
political system is broken, the argument goes, dominated by special
interests, divided by political hacks and disfigured by an unnecessary
civil war between "red" (Republican) and "blue" (Democratic) America.
Mr Obama promises to dethrone the lobbyists and reach out to people of
goodwill, of whatever persuasion, who want to take back control of
their country.

The problem with this argument is that Mr Obama has never pursued a
serious reform agenda in any job he has held. He eased his way into his
first job in politics, as a state senator in Illinois, by using a
"petitions guru" to challenge the signatures his rival, Alice Palmer,
had obtained to qualify for the ballot, an extraordinary move for a man
who had made his name trying to get poor people to vote. He had a
see-no-evil attitude to the Chicago political machine, one of the most
corrupt in the country. (John Kass, a columnist on the CHICAGO TRIBUNE,
described his record as that of a man who "won't make no waves and
won't back no losers".) He had a disturbingly close relationship with
Tony Rezko, a Chicago property magnate who made his career doing
favours for politicians who could open doors to real-estate contracts,
and who is now in prison. Mr Rezko contributed $250,000 to Mr Obama
over his career, and bought a lot next to his house.

HOW FAR TO THE LEFT?
This go-along-to-get-along attitude continued once Mr Obama had made it
to the Senate in Washington. He supported the farm bill and the
override of the president's veto, despite the fact that the bill
sprayed money at agri-business and raised barriers against farmers in
the developing world. A raft of pork projects, including Alaska's
"bridge to nowhere", received his support. He used his star power to
raise money for his political action committee, Hope Fund, and then
disbursed nearly $300,000 to Democrats who might be useful in his
election bid. The man who promises to reform America's political system
is the first presidential candidate ever to reject public funds for the
general election.

The anti-Obama argument is that the Illinois senator is a "stealth
liberal": a man who talks inclusive talk but is bent on advancing
hard-core "progressive" policies. Mr Obama is a disciple of Saul
Alinsky, an activist who expanded the labour movement's agenda to
include a wide range of grievances beyond the workplace. His friends in
Chicago included Jeremiah Wright, his long-time pastor, who believes
that September 11th represented America's chickens coming home to
roost, and Bill Ayers, a former member of the terrorist Weathermen. The
NATIONAL JOURNAL rated Mr Obama as the most liberal senator in 2007, to
the left of Barbara Boxer and Ted Kennedy.

This ignores Mr Obama's essential pragmatism. At every stage of his
career he has calibrated the balance of political forces and adjusted
his behaviour accordingly--embracing big-city liberalism when he was a
Chicago politician, moving to the centre when he won his party's
presidential nomination. His personal style, too, is conciliatory.
Everybody who has worked with him comments on his ability to forge
relations with Republicans and conservatives. He prefers compromise and
conciliation to confrontation.

Mr Obama's most impressive achievement has been his outmanoeuvring of
the mighty Clinton machine. There, too, as in his Senate race, he was
greatly helped by outside factors. His ascent was the culmination of a
shift in the balance of power in the Democratic Party that began with
George McGovern in the late 1960s: the rise of the knowledge elite. Mr
Obama's political base lay in what John Judis and Ruy Teixeira have
called "ideopolises"--cities such as San Francisco and Madison,
Wisconsin, which are rich in academics and professionals. He
encountered the stiffest resistance among blue-collar voters in rural
Appalachia and in the decaying manufacturing towns of rustbelt America.

HIS BEST TRUMP CARD
Mr Obama's mixed-race ancestry helped to supercharge his liberal base.
His hard-core supporters regard him not just as a "change agent" but
also as a "transformational figure"--a man who, simply by dint of who
he is, can repair America's global image and, more important, make
amends for the country's racist past. His ancestry also provided him
with the solid support of one of the party's solidest non-elite
constituencies, people who have done much of the party's grunt work,
black America.

His other trump card has been a talent for organisation. The Obama
campaign, directed by David Axelrod (see article[1]), has been the
best-run in recent Democratic history, strikingly free of the
personality clashes and general chaos that doomed Mrs Clinton's
efforts. It also outperformed the seasoned Clinton machine by every
possible measure--raising more money, understanding the importance of
the caucus states and mastering momentum.

Mr Obama understood from the first the power of the promise of "change"
when two-thirds of Americans said the country was heading the wrong
way. He made better use of new technology, such as social-networking
sites, than any previous candidate. He also struck the perfect balance
between central direction and popular enthusiasm--building support from
the bottom up but also giving his volunteers clear goals and tough
standards.

This will set him in good stead for the November election. Karl Rove,
Mr Bush's former strategist-in-chief, has frequently argued that the
president mostly owed his re-election in 2004 to the fact that the
campaign had recruited 1.4m volunteers. According to Ron Brownstein of
the NATIONAL JOURNAL, the Obama campaign thinks it may be able to turn
out four times that number, with local organisations in all 50 states.
These volunteers will act both as grass-roots organisers and as "local
validators", working to persuade their friends and neighbours to vote
for a man who, in his words, does not look like any of the other
presidents on the currency.

What sort of president will Mr Obama make if he wins in November? His
preference for avoiding specifics makes it particularly difficult to
answer this question. As a senator, he has few legislative achievements
to his credit--he has been running for the presidency since arriving in
Washington--and no executive experience. But some things are clear. He
will have everything going for him. The Democrats are likely to pick up
another ten to 20 seats in the House and five to seven in the Senate.
The defeated Republican Party will also be torn apart by a civil war
over what it stands for and where it should be going. The press will
swoon over America's first black president. Much of the rest of the
world, particularly the Europeans, will be captivated by the idea of
the rebirth of "good America" after the disastrous Bush years.

Mr Obama's talent for organisation suggests that he will create a
smooth-working White House. One foreign-policy grandee was struck, in
an early meeting with Mr Obama, by his interest in making things run
efficiently, and particularly by his concern that the National Security
Council should operate more effectively than it did under Condoleezza
Rice.

He is also likely to make a virtue of his "reasonableness", trying to
reach out to the opposition and listening, as Mr Bush seldom does, to
all sides of the argument. But his propensity for being all things to
all men will inevitably produce disappointment. Mr Obama has presented
himself as a business-friendly fellow, for example, frequently visiting
the funding wells of Silicon Valley and Wall Street. But he will also
be massively indebted to a labour movement that has devoted huge
resources to getting him elected.

Not least because of inexperience, Mr Obama will probably pursue a
cautious foreign policy. Paradoxically, the success of the "surge" in
Baghdad, which he adamantly opposed, makes it more likely that he will
be able to deliver on one of his central promises, to shift the focus
of the "war on terror" from Iraq to Afghanistan and its lawless border
with Pakistan. The Obama administration will introduce a revolution in
America's attitude to climate change. It will also make a virtue of
working through multilateral institutions--something that Mr Bush never
regarded as anything more than a necessary evil. But recent events,
particularly Russia's invasion of Georgia, suggest that he will spend
most of his time swatting away crises and trying to extricate America
from Iraq, rather than forging a new foreign-policy doctrine.

On the home front, Mr Obama is likely to devote much of his political
capital to health-care reform. He wants to provide near-universal
coverage through a combination of expanded government coverage,
subsidies for the poor and regulation for companies and insurance
providers. He is unlikely to be as hostile to free trade as his
NAFTA-bashing rhetoric during the campaign suggested. But his tax plans
will redistribute wealth from the rich, who have done fabulously over
the past couple of decades; and his combination of expanded government
activism and middle-class tax cuts will exacerbate one of America's
biggest structural problems, its horrific budget deficit.

AN END OF DYNASTIES
Whatever happens in November, Mr Obama's candidacy still marks an
important turning-point in American history. The upper reaches of
American politics have recently begun to look both plutocratic and
incestuous: Mr Obama's chief rival for the nomination was the wife of
George Bush's predecessor. Post-September-11th America was also gripped
by a patriotic frenzy that threatened to degenerate into Muslim-bashing
jingoism. Mr Obama is a genuine meritocrat who climbed the greasy pole
on the basis of his own grit and determination. He is also the
descendant of African Muslims, whose first name means "blessed" in
Arabic.

Most of all, Mr Obama is a black man in a country that denied black
people the vote as recently as 1964. Across the South, elderly black
people who turned up to vote for Mr Obama in the primaries told stories
of how they were once denied the vote on manufactured technicalities.
Mr Obama will deliver his acceptance speech in Denver on the 45th
anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech. That, in
itself, is an extraordinary comment on how far America has come over
the past half-century.