Nobody should underestimate the historic significance of the coming General Election in November. This significance has nothing to do with the fact that it will see either the first black or women candidate for President and everything to do with the fact that the Democrats have a historical opportunity to bury the Neo-conservative ideological project, personified by the Republican Party and George Bush. Given that context the individual battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama pales into insignificance.
First let me declare my hand; I, like a lot of people the world over, greatly admire Barack Obama's campaign and have drawn a lot of inspiration and hope from it; in fact it's one of the main reasons I am back in politics as anything other than a writer and commentator. I greatly resent the way Clinton voted on Iraq and see massive flaws in her campaign, her claims of greater experience are overblown and dubious to say the least when on several occasions she has proven to be a rankly incompetent legislator. Questions also remain about the extent to which her and her husband used high office to feather their own nest; having said that and although it was clearly a political gambit, her offer of the vice-presidency should not have been treated in such a dismissive way by Obama.
Comments by the advisers of both sides have not helped; Samantha Powers was out of line calling Clinton a monster and Geraldine Ferraro was just plain dillusional in her comments. The furore over Jeremiah Wright has damaged Obama but the very fact that it has damaged him has not reflected well on either side. It is ironic and sad that John McCain, who recently suspended a member of his campaign for trying to use it, is called upon to restore decency; he is right, it should defiantly not be an issue but when has Clinton come out and unequvically said the same thing as she should have done?? Instead she has been happily to silently profit from the affair which again adds to my dislike of her personally and her campaign.
Obama's race is, if anything, a handicap as it has allowed the subtle questioning of his patriotism to become easier. Patriotism is such a tricky concept but it should never, and I mean never, mean 'my country right or wrong' to progressives, it should mean a critical engagement and trying to make ones country the best it can be and, when it falls short of that, it means an unstinting critique as one would a wayward friend. The fact is this; large bodies of world public opinion are sick and tired of the way American governments conduct themselves on the world stage. For the last 8 years at least and sometimes even longer than that they have acted as if they are above the norms of international law and in some instances as if THEY ARE the law. In that climate, a critical engagement with ones own body politic is essential.
America as a nation can no longer command the moral or the intellectual authority necessary to lead. Following 9/11 America received massive understanding and sympathy from a shocked and disguested world and now that has simply been frittered away, mostly in the killing fields of Iraq. The world needs a Democratic presidency just as much as Americans do and it is this that gives everybody a stake in this election. It is with growing dismay then that people will be watching the bitterness of the fight between Obama and Clinton; a certain amount of overblown rhetoric and half-truth claim and counter-claim (something that both sides have been guilty of) are expected and indeed forgiven but when it damages the cause and leads to reinvigoration of a Republican Party that has done so much damage to America and the world at large it should be a cause of global concern.
We seem to be in a stalemate; Clinton may well claim Pennsylvania and elsewhere but it is unlikely to be enough to overhaul Obama's delegate advantage. Wrangling over Michigan and Florida and a seedy round of back room superdelegate deals can only damage the Democrats further; November 08 is not a shoe-in, it is a battle that the party must go out there and win. It can win, the conditions are right and people are ready to hear the arguments and rally to them but it won't be won like this and it is high time that both the Obama and Clinton campaigns recognised this. It is naive in the extreme to view any kind of publicity as good publicity. Presidential politics lends itself to the individual at the expense of the cause, that is a quirk of the system that both sides must overcome. If you look over the road at the Republicans then you will see that John McCain wasn't very well liked at first and probably still isn't but the point is that early on they realised the value of compromising their convictions in order to further the greater cause. So, the question to both sides is this, what are you going to do??