Election08

It appears as though the theoretical coronation of Barak Obama as the President of the United States might not be such a forgone conclusion after all. The most recent Newsweek poll revealed that the Democrat presidential candidate, Barak Obama leads Republican rival John McCain by just 3 percentage points, which equates to a statistical dead heat -- and a precipitous drop from the 15-point lead Obama held just one month ago.

There are different opinions about why there has been this very rapid shift. Obama has run up against challenges and accusations of flip flopping on certain of his policies since clinching his party's nomination in June, but McCain's big move forward to approximate parity is difficult to explain.

There is a school of thought that seeks to explain Obama’s decreasing popularity with the normal bedrock of Democratic supporters because they feel he has moved to the center ground of politics away from the more defined, left of center stance he took during the primaries. To be fair his move to the middle is the standard move of all the serious Presidential candidates at this stage of the election process and is certainly not unique to Obama.

More relevant is the Hillary factor. Although Hillary Clinton has made all the right noises about getting her supporters in behind her former rival there are big danger signs for the Democrat Party that there are many of her supporters who are remaining consistent in their antipathy to the candidate. This is despite the fact that there is hardly anything to choose between the declared policies of Obama and Clinton. So this negativity is either racially motivated, which I don’t believe to be the case, or is because Barak is not a woman, for which there is no ready cure. It’s hard to see what more Hillary can do to alleviate this problem for her recent foe. The only obvious thing that Obama can do to inherit her votes is to put her on his ticket as his running mate for the post of Vice President, but he’s unlikely to want to do that because getting Hillary means also getting Bill, and it’s clear that Obama wouldn’t want that. I’m not entirely convinced that Hillary would want the job anyhow, as I think she might prefer to be offered the job of Secretary of State.

Another fairly obvious way to grab Hillary’s vote is to put another woman on the ticket with Obama, someone more malleable and with less of a history. There is an obvious drawback to all this posturing and that is this, rather than attract Democrat voters to an alliance between a minority candidate plus a woman you might be alienating the vast hinterland of American voters who are so far unattached, who actually win you the elections, and are probably going to be happiest if Obama adds a white, middle aged American, who looks and sounds a bit like a Democrat John McCain.

It seems as though there might be an unspoken reticence to elect someone from a minority although we can all hope that this is not the case. It’s very possible that Hillary would have suffered in the same way had she triumphed in the Primaries. There are a great many reactionary people in every democracy. However, the man’s color, like Hillary Clinton’s gender should not influence the voters, but it might just do so when the other choice is a very pleasant seeming white bread kind of man.

Until Obama can sort the Clinton problem out he is going to have an ongoing and growing problem with John McCain. This Republican is beginning to remind me more of Ronald Reagan or a latter day Harry S. Truman, without the dollops of charm or great communication skills, rather than the Bush dynasty, either father or son.

There is great surprise in the great metropolitan areas of the US that McCain is doing so well. They sit around their smart dining tables in Manhattan or Beverly Hills certain that the election is bound to result in an Obama victory. But they were equally certain that Arnold Schwarzenegger was a total joke when he stood for Governor of California, and similarly considered that Ronald Reagan had no chance. These know alls knew nothing, and were totally wrong, and this could be the same thing happening all over again.

McCain is not too smart or too fluent, but there are a great many American voters who will see this as more of a gift than a hindrance. He does seem straight, brave and one of them, and in the final analysis that might just win this election against all the odds.