John Mulaa
2 November 2008
opinion
The US presidential campaign is in the home stretch.
The final campaign days have witnessed hectic activity by both the Republican and Democratic teams. Senators Barack Obama and John McCain have crisscrossed the country, at times with their running mates in tow, other times alone, chasing that elusive undecided American voter on whom the fate of the country rests.
The polls indicate that the majority of voters have already made up their mind and close to 20 per cent will have voted by November 4, the official voting day.
The closing campaign days have also witnessed an upsurge in name calling especially by the McCain camp. It was not entirely unexpected.
Those of us who have lived through several US presidential elections have become used to it, and indeed expect serious mudslinging towards the close of campaigns.
IT WAS TOWARDS THE END OF THE last presidential campaign that groups allied with George Bush "Swift-boated" John Kerry by buying up inordinate amounts of airtime to attack his Vietnam record. That piece of dirty work made all the difference.
Bush won Ohio by a few thousand votes, the state that put him over the top and gave him a second term. Kerry was too slow to react, a lesson that the Democratic Party took to heart, vowing not to let it happen again.
McCain and company have been hurling the charge of "socialist" at Obama these past few days.
The opportunity presented itself for McCain after an old radio interview in which Obama used the word "redistribution" in a technical legal way surfaced.
The McCain camp quickly surmised that the former constitutional law professor was talking nothing less than unadulterated Marxism.
Things got so comical that a television journalist in Florida put Obama's running mate Joe Biden on the spot last weekend quoting to him the Karl Marx's famous formulation of distribution of goods and services in a socialist society thus: "From each according to his ability to each according to his needs." Taken aback, Biden asked the interviewer whether it was a joke.
She insisted she was serious. According to the journalist, any talk of "re-distribution" of income comes straight from Marx and is therefore antithetical to American values.
FEW THINGS ARE AS SCARIER TO JOE Six-Pack or Joe the Plumber, as the term socialism. Schooled to mistrust and fear most things foreign, the ordinary American associates a term such as socialist with government takeover of everything in sight.
McCain and running mate Sarah Palin have sought to capitalise on this fear, drumming into their supporters the prospect of a thoroughgoing ideological makeover of America should Senator Obama and the Democrats win.
The simple explanation is that this great country is one of extremes -- pockets of deep and unrivalled knowledge about anything under the sun and beyond, and swathes of unbelievable ignorance that one suspects the system is all too happy to countenance.
As the more knowledgeable Americans have pointed out, charges that a Democratic win with Obama will usher in a period of massive redistribution of wealth are dwarfed by the very real near-takeover of the financial sector by a Republican-led administration.
Political theorists have been saying that the charge of socialism should properly be laid at the door of conservatives who have been in charge for the past eight years.
They point out that under Republican stewardship, massive redistribution of wealth has occurred and the beneficiaries are not ordinary Americans.
But, of course, the Democrats know better than to use such arguments with the ordinary voters. Many of them will not get it to begin with, in which case it is a waste of time to try.
What is even worse, it might trigger a charge of lack of patriotism, another accusation that Americans about to lose arguments with fellow Americans are quick to hurl.
THE LACK OF CANDOUR IN NATIONAL debates in America borders on the surreal.
Certain things dare not be said, even if they happen to be true, because of the almost certain possibility that they will be grossly misinterpreted and used against whoever said them.
It took former secretary of state Colin Powell to point out the obvious absurdity in a national political discourse that has tended to equate Muslim with Arab and terrorist and evil.
At a recent McCain political rally, a woman told him that she had heard Senator Obama was an Arab.
To his partial credit, McCain stated that Senator Obama is an honourable American citizen. However, he did not correct the woman's misperception about Arabs (that they are automatically bad). Powell made the correction as he used the opportunity to endorse Obama.
He said that there are millions of law-abiding and patriotic Muslim Americans, some of whom have given their lives in the service of the country. Yet recent supercharged political talk has tended to suggest that one cannot be a Muslim and a good American.
Palin is the most rabid in her use of insinuation, innuendo, and outright insults. She pounced on the claim that Obama is a socialist and has been spouting it at her rallies.
There is a lingering suspicion among pundits that if asked to define the term, Palin would be tongue-tied or she would spew words that have little connection to the question.
AFTER THE SOCIALIST MANTRA BEcame a little jaded, Palin found another cause: Senator Obama's alleged association with a one-time faculty mate at the University of Chicago, Rashid Khalidi, now a professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Columbia University.
Another radical in Senator Obama's closet, Palin declared in her cheeky and airy manner.
Some Americans are listening to her. That is American campaigning for you.
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