A Historic Election
With barely a week to go before American voters go to the polls November 4 (that is, those who haven’t already voted early), it is possible to make some generalizations about the election campaign that is now in its final throes.
First, it is the most expensive presidential election in U.S. history, by far. By the time the polling places open November 4, it will have cost at least $5.3 billion. Money has been spent by both parties at double the rate for 2004, but the Democrats have both raised and spent almost twice as much as the Republicans. Most of their money, they say, has come from relatively small donations of as little as $20. Senator Obama in September 2008 alone raised an astonishing $150 million.
Second, the campaign was also the longest. Democratic Senators Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden announced their candidacies in January 2007, 22 months before the 2008 election. Senator Barack Obama was a little later—in February 2007—and Senator John McCain officially announced in April 2007. Forty-eight years ago, in 1960, Time Magazine wondered if the presidential campaign season of that year might not be too long. It was then just eleven months in duration. Today it is has become twice as long as that, and even longer if one considers the time candidates need to spend before announcing in forming an “exploratory committee.”
Third, it is historic for the obvious reason that the candidate of the Democratic Party, with a significant chance of winning, is of African background. There have been African-American presidential candidates before, obviously, but none has ever come as close to the pinnacle of American political power as Barack Obama.
Fourth, if McCain wins, his vice-presidential running mate, Governor Sarah Palin, will be the first female vice-president in American history.
Fifth, the election occurs at a time of the greatest global financial crisis since the Great Depression that started in 1929. The economic crisis has dwarfed in importance even the fact that the U.S. is currently involved also in two overseas wars.
But most voters correctly sense that the election is historic in a more fundamental way than the statistics of cost and length indicate, or even the presence of a global financial tsunami. If Obama wins, and if the Democrats increase their strength in the House and Senate, as expected, there is likely to be a change in the direction of American politics and society of a significance that merits the term “revolutionary.” In contrast with most presidential elections since the 1980s, the current race is not between two relatively moderate centrists, but between a moderate center-right candidate—John McCain, and a Democratic senator—Obama—who has the most liberal voting record in the current U.S. Senate.
McCain might be thought of by some as “very conservative” because of his past support for President George W. Bush. But McCain has often voted against—and indeed angered—his own political party’s establishment on issues such as campaign finance reform and the use of torture against captured suspected terrorists. Obama, by contrast, has expressed views on both domestic and foreign policy issues that set him to the left of the center of the Democratic Party. On abortion, he is clearly the most radical pro-choice candidate ever to run for president, voting in his Illinois State Senate career against special provisions to protect the lives of babies who inadvertently survive a botched abortion. If his daughters became pregnant out of wedlock, he said, he wouldn’t want to “punish” them by making them give birth to the baby. With the likelihood that, as president, he will be able to nominate at least two Supreme Court nominees, almost certainly to be of known pro-choice views, it is likely that an Obama administration will make it significantly harder for Americans in the future ever to attempt to put limits on abortion.
An Obama administration is likely to inaugurate a national health-care program that will be as decisive an innovation in American life as social security was in the 1930s. It is scarcely possible to believe that, to do this, as well as to implement other domestic policies he has promised, he will stay true to his campaign policies not to raise taxes. A national health-care program could not be paid for without significant increase in government revenue, and Congressional Democrats themselves have gone on record favoring a significant increase in taxation.
On foreign policy, though during the campaign he was careful to court Jewish voters with pro-Israel comments, Obama’s previous friendships with former PLO advisor Rashid Khalidi and Dr. Edward Said and former U.S. domestic terrorist William Ayers, indicate a view of Israel much less supportive of the Jewish state than any recent presidential candidate of either major political party (It is not widely known how venomously hostile Ayers has been towards Israel). No less a person than Rev. Jesse Jackson, who has known Obama for years, told a reporter of the New York Post that, under Obama, the “decades of putting Israel’s interests first” would end and that the “Zionists” who “controlled American policy for decades” would “lose their clout” with Obama in the White House.
What does that mean, assuming Rev. Jackson has had conversations with Obama that indicate a revolutionary new line on Israel? It isn’t clear. Obama actually seems less intuitive and indeed less impulsive than McCain, and there may be no dramatic and immediate changes in American foreign policy. But if, as Senator Biden, Obama’s vice-presidential running-mate suggests, Obama is quite soon “tested” by foreign adversaries of the U.S. in the same way President Kennedy was “tested” by Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, then what is likely to come to the fore are Obama’s core convictions.
What are these? We really don’t know, other than a professed love of the U.S. The last item of historical significance about this election, in fact, is how little Americans really know about Obama. We probably know less about the biography of Senator Obama after twenty months of campaigning than we have ever known about any previous presidential candidate. Even the release of his birth certificate has been blocked. His academic records at Occidental College and Columbia University have not been released. His undergraduate thesis at Columbia is still a secret. No fellow-student has come forward to talk about college memories of Obama, and Obama himself hasn’t volunteered any information whatsoever about his undergraduate or law school years. As for his twenty years as a member of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, nothing at all is known except that he was married there, his children were baptized there, and he never knew that Rev. Jeremiah Wright was saying any of those poisonous things about America. Ever.
Yes, the 2008 election will be truly historic. It might also be, well, revolutionary. Let us hope that Americans understand what revolution they really want in our national life.
Dr. Aikman, a Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum, was for many years senior correspondent for Time.
Columns, David Aikman, Leadership, Public Square, Thu 30 Oct 2008
