The crowd could sense history in the warm Florida air. They had come from miles around. The town was called Sunrise. The assembled thousands wanted to see the man who stands on the brink of being the first black president of the US.
Dan Bernard, 49, had brought his three young nephews and nieces. They had driven for hours.
“I wanted them to see history. I want them to look back when they are grandparents and be able to say: ‘I was there,’” Bernard said.
It was a common sentiment. Democratic Senator Barack Obama himself shared it.
“At this defining moment in history, you can give this country the change we need,” Obama told the cheering throng, prompting an ear-splitting level of noise.
One of the most extraordinary elections ever fought has brought the American people to choice either a young, liberal black senator from Chicago or an old, conservative war hero. Their choice will affect the entire world.
It has been an astonishing journey. The titanic struggle has fascinated people around the globe. Most of that attention has been focused on Obama. He has brought a touch of the rock star into US politics. From Berlin to St Louis, he has appeared in front of crowds of 100,000 or more. He has raised more money than any other presidential candidate in history. His candidacy has resembled more a social movement than a political campaign. It could end by making a black American the most powerful man in the world and signal a once-in-a-generation change in America.
“He’s black and he’s got a Middle Eastern-sounding name. Yet the country is positioned to vote for him for president. That’s enormous,” said Seth Masket, a political scientist at the University of Denver.
But it is not over quite yet. Senator John McCain and the Republican Party remain in the race. They are behind in the polls in the battleground states, but the gap has narrowed recently. McCain has struck a fiercely populist note and he knows how to fight. All of McCain’s great triumphs — in war and in politics — have come against the odds.
“Nothing is inevitable here. We never quit. We don’t hide from history. We make history,” he told an enthusiastic crowd in Mentor, Ohio, last week.
The beaming grin on his face showed that McCain believes he can do it. But it will not be up to him. This race will be decided by tens of millions of Americans at the polls. Only then will the watching world know who will next occupy the Oval Office. They will know if the greatest election in recent history has a final twist in its tale.
The election has already been an epic for Obama. His quest for the White House began what seemed like an age ago. In February last year, at the “winter meeting” of the Democratic National Committee in Washington’s Hilton hotel, each Democratic hopeful gave an introductory speech to a crowd of activists. They laid out their stall. Obama’s stood out only because it was so bare compared to his ribbon-draped rivals. There were no campaign placards. No badges or posters. Just a sign-up sheet and a few pens placed on a desk manned by two young volunteers.
Yet from that humble beginning sprang one of the largest political movements since the Civil Rights era. It has been a triumph of organization in the technology age. Utilizing the Internet and driven by tech-savvy young staffers, it has changed the face of US political campaigning. It has 3.1 million financial contributors. The campaign’s Facebook page has 2.2 million supporters. It is set up in cyberspace and in more than 700 campaign offices in every state in the US, including ones where Obama has no chance of winning. No matter. Through time and money, everyone can still contribute. And they do. Obama has raised US$640 million so far. That has allowed him to outspend and outgun first Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and now McCain. Nothing demonstrated his advantage better than his half-hour national TV advertisement last week. Previously only eccentric billionaires such as Ross Perot could afford that. Now Obama shrugs off such expenses, too.
No one expected his campaign to change politics this way. As the first black American to win a major party nomination, Obama was thought likely to face an election dominated by race. Yet his candidacy changed things there, too. He ran an explicitly “post-racial” campaign, heralding a new type of politics. Obama’s rallies attract blacks, whites, Hispanics and Asians. They reflect a changing society, in which younger generations are less obsessed with race.
“America has moved past a lot of these racial stereotypes,” said Patrick Dejour, a business consultant at the Sunrise rally.
Dejour is black but married to a white woman and their children are — like Obama — of mixed race.
“That’s why he’s attracted so many people. We just don’t see this as being about race,” Dejour said.
Experts agree, and predict that will be a Democratic strength in the years to come as minorities make up a larger proportion of the US population.
“We are dealing with a country and a generation that feels that diversity is a growing part of who we are,” said Stan Greenberg, a Democratic pollster and former member of former US president Bill Clinton’s famed campaign “‘War Room.”
But Obama could not avoid the race issue altogether. Indeed, it posed the biggest threat to his campaign. When videos of Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright, giving a racially charged speech hit the Internet, race became briefly central to the campaign. Everyone noticed the elephant in the room. Obama seized the issue directly. In a speech called “A More Perfect Union,” delivered in Philadelphia, he appealed for the US to understand its racist past, but also to move beyond it.
Not everyone did. In various forms — such as rumors of him being a Muslim or snide remarks at him not being a “real” American — Obama’s opponents have sought to be portray him as the Other. But it hasn’t worked.
“For the most part, race has been background noise,” Masket said.
Obama has consciously reached out to the white working class, which is most likely to resist electing a black man. He has done it in a conciliatory manner, as a political moderate. Thus Obama — a black liberal — is returning the Democrats to the US South. In Virginia, North Carolina and Florida, Obama is turning once fiercely red states to shades of blue. It is yet another unexpected turn in his remarkable candidacy.
Yet none of it would have been possible without Clinton. The epic nomination battle that began in Iowa and threatened to continue to the convention floor at Denver forged Obama as a candidate.
It meant his skeletons popped out of the cupboard early on. It gave him a ground organization in each state. The debates sharpened his skills and the media wars honed his team into ruthless professionals. It also stunned pundits with the sheer size of the voter turnout, dwarfing the Republican contest.
“‘The biggest surprise was the scale of voting. The turnout has been simply amazing. That was the sign that things were really going to be different this time,” Greenberg said.
The nomination fight made Obama as a politician. He stayed cool, calm and collected and so when the greatest challenge of the election — the economic crisis — hit, he was unruffled. As McCain rushed back to Washington, Obama kept his head. As the US economy started to bleed and its financial system collapsed, Obama looked more like the stuff presidents are made of. The polls decisively broke in his direction. McCain has been scrambling to catch up ever since. Yet it has taken its toll. The brutal campaign has put Obama through a physical and emotional wringer that few can imagine.
“No one really understands what its like. It’s exhausting,” said two-time former Democratic presidential hopeful and Ohio Republican Representative Dennis Kucinich.
But the effect on Obama was clear. Even at a distance at the rally in Florida, one could see that Obama’s once youthful head of hair has become deeply flecked with grey.
But Obama has not yet won. McCain and the Republicans are fighting hard, especially in the key state of Ohio. No Republican has ever won the White House without Ohio and McCain hit the state last week in a two-day bus blitz. With him was the man who has become the last-ditch “working man” symbol of the Republican campaign: Joe Wurzelbacher — “Joe the Plumber.”
In Mentor, Ohio, a small working-class suburb of Cleveland, Wurzelbacher was given a hero’s welcome by several thousand people who crammed into Mentor High School’s gym. He told them he was voting for a “real American”’ in the shape of McCain. McCain was gleeful and strident.
“I have been in a lot of campaigns and I have seen momentum. I can feel the momentum in this room tonight. I can feel it. I can feel it,” he said.
He will need it. Obama has bitten deep into Republican territory, appealing to white-working class voters, rural voters and the “exurbs.” Only a last-minute wave of support, or some unforeseen flaw in the opinion polls, can propel McCain over the finish line in first place. His support is vocal and numerous, but feels out of touch with changing US concerns. The campaign has portrayed Obama as a socialist, someone who will raise taxes. Or a dangerous radical who “pals around” with terrorists. It has worked for the party’s core support.
“I don’t like Obama. I don’t like Marxism. It is not American,” said Mark Kopan, an information-technology consultant who wore a T-shirt opposing anti-illegal immigration.
But even here, inside the hall, grumbling disappointment was not hard to find. McCain’s real problem has not been Obama. It has been the past eight years of Republican rule and US President George W. Bush. In poll after poll, it has been obvious that Americans everywhere desperately want a change in direction. Now the cracks are starting to show in the once-formidable Republican machine that as recently as 2005 was plotting the creation of a “permanent majority” in US politics. The cracks have spread to the McCain campaign itself, revealing a split between McCain and his running mate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Their supporters have sniped at each other through anonymous leaks to reporters. The conservative right of the party has already planned a meeting later this week in rural Virginia to discuss how the party should move forward after Election Day. Many experts believe the Republicans face civil war.
“The next two years, maybe longer, will be a time of internal conflict and soul-searching and messiness,” said Larry Haas, a political commentator and former aide in president Bill Clinton’s White House.
But last week in Ohio, McCain’s campaign was still planning a victory in the must-win state.
“We are going to do it the old-fashioned way. We are going to have to earn it,” Ohio Representative Steve LaTourette said.
If McCain wins here, if he sweeps Mentor and the hundreds of communities in Ohio like it, he has a chance. But if he loses, Obama will be president. Everything is at stake. That is why no one is taking Ohio for granted.
“Ohio can break your heart,” Kucinich said.
The choice Americans face today is between the liberal versus the conservative; the warrior versus the conciliator; the old versus the young; and, finally, black versus white. On the campaign trail last week, the two sides felt starkly different. Even the town names suggested a fight between experience and optimism: Mentor versus Sunrise.
The lines for Obama’s event began hours before it opened and stretched for kilometers. There was a carnival atmosphere inside a vast stadium.
For McCain, it was a school gym and the line never left the car park. Inside, it was patriotic shouts of “USA! USA!” McCain launched into a scathing attack, playing on the familiar themes of cutting taxes, supporting the military and boosting Joe the Plumber’s working-class authenticity.
Meanwhile, Obama’s rhetoric soared amid talk of unity and change. His running mate, Senator Joe Biden, introduced him with a speech that mentioned a pantheon of American political Gods: former presidents Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy.
But hubris is dangerous. The final words do not belong to any politician. They belong to American voters. Their collective decision could put a black man in the White House, or it could reject him for an ageing warrior who found his political soulmates in the form of an Ohio plumber and a Hockey Mom. The US is at the crossroads.
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