After the Bush years of cronyism, wars and neoconservatism, Obama offers the US the chance of fresh start, writes Tony Kinsella
FIFTY-SIX YEARS ago, worried US voters were preparing to elect a new president. An unpopular incumbent was not standing, the country was mired in the morass of the Korean war, and felt threatened by Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union.
Dwight D Eisenhower, the second World War supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe, accepted the Republican nomination and won a landslide victory of 39 states, 442 electoral college votes and more than 55 per cent of the popular vote. As we enter the closing days of this year's campaign, poll projections are giving Senator Barack Obama upwards of 30 states, 354 electoral college votes and just over 52 per cent of the popular vote. Landslides and endless wars are, however, where the similarities end.
The fears of US electors in 2008 are more domestic than foreign. They are much more alarmed about losing their jobs and homes, their country's pathetic healthcare and its crumbling infrastructure than about wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, however unpopular.
Eisenhower ended the Korean war, launched massive federal investment in US infrastructure with the building of the interstate highways from 1956, and steered the early Civil Rights Acts through Congress. When Arkansas refused a federal court order to racially integrate its schools in 1957, he deployed troops to ensure compliance.
The 1952 Republican Party was the party of those who owned and operated businesses across the US - people who made profits and raised their families with a level of concern for, and engagement in, their communities. Balanced budgets with prudent public investments were their financial gospel. Their patriotism was motivational and inclusive.
The party had a libertarian streak, an innate distrust of "big government" including a rugged defence of individual freedoms. It was none of the government's business to interfere in your life - including your personal life. The party was predominantly middle class, mainstream Episcopalian and Lutheran Protestant. It was overwhelmingly white, perhaps more a reflection of a racially segregated society, than a racist organisation in its own right.
About the only thing left of this old Eisenhower Republican Party is that it remains overwhelmingly white. If its practical business heart still beats, that faint fluttering has long been drowned in a cacophony of neoconservative ideology, evangelical fundamentalism, proprietorial pseudo-patriotism, fiscal recklessness, blind faith in the free market, gross incompetence and cronyism. Neoconservative ideologues promoted the use of military power to impose US style democracy and free market economies. Not least among the monuments to their hubris are the corpses of the thousands who have perished from the shores of the Persian Gulf to the snows of the Hindu Kush.
Extreme evangelical Christians are fundamentalists in their demand that the state should impose their beliefs on all. Organised religion had played a minor role in Eisenhower's life. He was only baptised after his inauguration in 1953.
Today, he probably could not win the 2008 Republican nomination. John McCain's party equates patriotism with supporting his candidacy. Virginia voters who vote Democrat do not inhabit the "real Virginia", while Michele Bachman, a Republican congresswoman from Minnesota, accused Obama and his supporters of harbouring "anti-American views".
The Bush administration cut taxes for the wealthy while spending over $10 billion a month on the country's wars. Bush inherited a fiscal surplus when he took office, he leaves an abyssal deficit for his successor.
"Markets good - regulation bad" ran Washington's Orwellian chant. In the face of acute recession, when it was suggested to Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, last Thursday that his ". . . ideology, was not right, it was not working". Greenspan could only agree: "Absolutely, precisely," he replied.
People whose only qualification was party loyalty were dispatched to spend billions of dollars in Iraq. Few programmes were ever completed, while millions in banknotes simply vanished. Perhaps the most blatant example of incompetent cronyism was that of Michael "heck of a job" Brown. His qualification for running the Federal Emergency Management Agency? Stewardship of the Arabian Horse Association. His agency's incompetence left hundreds of US citizens to drown in the cesspool that had been New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina struck.
It says much about how the US has changed that the real heir to Eisenhower is Barack Obama, a 47-year-old Kenyan-American. One of the first to recognise this was Eisenhower's granddaughter Susan who wrote in the Washington Post last February that "I am not alone in worrying that my generation will fail to do what my grandfather's did so well: Leave America a better, stronger place than the one it found . . . this lifelong Republican will work to get [Barack Obama] elected."
It fell to the most obvious Eisenhower heir and fellow Republican, Colin Powell, former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and former secretary of state, to offer a powerful, and devastating, endorsement on October 19th last: "Obama has displayed a steadiness; showed intellectual vigour. . . he has both style and substance . . . a transformational figure . . . that's why I'm supporting Barack Obama."
Obama has grown into his presidential role through myriad challenges and occasional gaffes. His campaign has unleashed and harnessed extraordinary passion in a nation where politics, in any classical understanding of the term, had become moribund.
Many commentators have yet to grasp the game-changing nature of the Obama campaign. It has built a grassroots movement right across the US, including states where the Democratic party had all but disappeared, while raising over $600 million in the process.
The US has reached a determining crossroads. It has a choice between constructively engaging with the rest of the world through Obama, or meandering off into impoverished sectarian irrelevancy under McCain. It looks, thankfully, as though it will choose the future. The rest of us have already been obliged to do so.