An American election merely about likeability? The question — the disturbing question — arose during the ABC debate between the candidates in the New Hampshire primary when Hillary Clinton effusively agreed that Barack Obama was very likeable. He conceded that she was "likeable enough".
And, looking back, one might agree that the relaxed Ronald Reagan was indeed more likeable than the idealistic but anxious Jimmy Carter, the friendly Bill Clinton than the starched Bush senior, and the then unknown Bush junior than the then very wooden Al Gore. It was said of Warren Harding, a president of the Twenties, that he seemed like everybody’s favourite uncle, an easy-going, gregarious man with silver hair, a handsome profile, and a voice that enthralled and comforted. Yet Harding is generally agreed to have been the stupidest and most incompetent American president of the century.
In the event, New Hampshire seemed to show that likeability is not the only key to the White House. People certainly found Obama highly attractive, charming and magnetic; Clinton, in spite of the eternal smile and even after that not-quite-tears at the press conference, still a mite forbidding.
But likeability is a dangerous guide to the merits of politicians. The most attractive are not always the most intelligent or the most competent. The most charming people you are likely to meet are often the greatest rogues and they probably sell more used cars than their sedulously honest colleagues do.
Barack Obama is not, so far as can be seen, any sort of a fraud. And he is certainly not stupid. But there are puzzling things about his record. He wrote learnedly against the Patriot Act, the most dangerous incursion on democratic freedoms by any government in modern times, and then went on to vote for it. He said he opposed the war in Iraq but he voted for the money that enables it to continue.
And though many journalists decided that he was the new knight of the liberal left, his public health proposals are far less comprehensive than Hillary Clinton’s.
But doubtless these things will have been well-aired before the election is over.
What is less likely to be among the stuff traded on the hustings is the fact that the banks and the various branches of the money industry are the authors and only begetters of the economic crisis that now faces the United States and the rest of the world, our own part of it included. The crisis that now looms over us all is a crisis of greed.
Perhaps nothing can be done by a new president after January of next year to avert the worst consequences. But when that president is installed much will need to be done — though it will probably not be done — to control the people and the institutions that brought it about. John Edwards has been the only candidate so far to mention corporate power and to speak of what he called "the corporate wall" against significant change. It’s good news that he is still in the race, however improbable he may be to win the nomination.
Still less likely to get an outing in the election of the new president is the fact that the presidency has been for a long time the captive of the Israeli lobby. Bush talked tough during his first visit to the Middle East last week, but so far it is only talk. It is, of course, right that America should be the guarantor of Israel’s safety, but an almost complete unwillingness to do anything concrete to influence Israel’s policy or to control its worst excesses contributes to no country’s safety, including Israel’s.
But serious discussion of policy is considered in many quarters to lessen the entertainment value of these contests. A candidate who plunges too readily into convolutions of policy will plunge off screen. The entertainment value of both Iowa and New Hampshire was certainly high and the sheer human interest of South Carolina, with all its probings of the psychology of race and background, will be high as well.
But interest is a constituent even of mere entertainment. Can we really remain interested and find much more matter for entertainment in Barack Obama’s endless repetitions of his belief in the need for change?
Many agree that there is a need for change, an urgent need. But Obama is the candidate and he needs to tell people which, among the many things that the presidency touches or can influence, he has most urgently in mind, how he will set about change and to further what ends.
Getting rid of George Bush and the mendacious crew of war-mongers who surround him will be change and change for the better, but it will happen in the course of nature, constitutional nature at least. Any of the possible Republican successors we have seen so far, even the fundamentalist banjo player Huckabee or the Mormon millionaire Romney, would actually be an improvement.
Of course, a good deal more discussion of policy does take place than we are given by our soundbite and soap opera-style coverage. And some issues have a way of forcing themselves on the candidates and even into the soundbites. The big one this time will be the rapidly deteriorating American economy. We may even have a replay of our own little election with, in a threatening situation, people opting for stability and experience in the shape of Hillary Clinton (Bertie in our case) instead of undefined changes in the form of Obama (Kenny).
One way or another though, a progressive deterioration of conditions can only benefit Hillary Clinton, who will almost certainly prove more convincing in the measures she suggests as well as being able to stand over her husband’s track record. It is possible that as the weeks pass, she will be able to account for what will be significant electoral gains by echoing the phrase Bill used 16 years ago in answer to a query: "It’s the economy, stupid."
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