TOP FIVE REASONS WHY ONLY OBAMA CAN BEAT MCCAIN

Sitting here watching the election race on this side of the ‘pond’, I am delighted and genuinely bemused to see that my preferred presidential candidate – the lesser of all the various evils – Senator Barack Obama is on a roll, having won five primaries on the trot and now having captured more states and amassed more delegates than former front runner and former first lady, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.

With the Republicans on the verge of crowning Senator John McCain as their candidate, it is time for undecided Democrats and wavering independents to think long and hard about who the best candidate would be to deal with the specific threat from McCain – who has cross-party appeal, an affable and likeable personality, a ‘maverick’ reputation and a distinguished military background as a former prisoner of war.

Nonetheless, according to the most recent Associated Press poll, Barack Obama (unlike Hillary Clinton) would narrowly defeat John McCain if they were matched today in the presidential election. This doesn’t really surprise me, as I believe that there are five overwhelming and undeniable reasons why Obama is the only man (sorry, person) who can beat McCain, come November:

1. IRAQ

The issue of Iraq remains bitterly divisive in modern America and is unlikely to go away any time soon. It was a major factor in the Republicans' defeat in the November 2006 mid-term elections and – despite the supposed success of the General David Petraeus’ recent troop ‘surge’ in Baghdad – polls continue to suggest a majority of Americans view Iraq as a top concern and want US troops home as soon as possible.
Here’s how New York Times columnist Frank Rich reported the story in January:

"The continued political import of Iraq could be found in three different polls in the past six weeks -- Pew, ABC News-Washington Post and Wall Street Journal-NBC News . .. the percentage of Americans who believe that the war is going well has risen strikingly in tandem with the diminution of violence -- from 30 percent in February to 48 percent in November, for instance, in the Pew survey. Even so, these same polls show no change at all in the public's verdict on this misadventure or in President Bush's dismal overall approval rating. By the same margins as before (sometimes even slightly larger), a majority of Americans favor withdrawal no matter what happened during the 'surge.' In another poll (Gallup), a majority still call the war a mistake, a finding that has varied little since February 2006."

On the same day, The Times concluded: "Concern over the war in Iraq, despite recent advances in security there, also remains on the minds of independent voters and has contributed to a shift toward Democrats..."

Obama, unliked Clinton, opposed the Iraq war from the very beginning, calling it a "dumb" war. His anti-war stance is in tune with the majority of Americans. McCain, on the other hand, has been a passionate and ardent supporter of the Iraq misadventure and now bizarrely agitates for war against Iran too. In a recent town-hall meeting, he confessed to being perfectly okay with American troops staying in Iraq for another hundred years (!) Obama has already begun referring, cleverly and accurately, to the ‘Bush-McCain Republicans’, tying the Arizona Senator to the unpopular president and his even more unpopular war. Let’s hope for more of this in the run-up to November…

2. RHETORIC

Whatever you think of Obama, it is impossible to deny his verbal virtuosity. Ever since his barn-storming, eye-catching, heart-lifting speech to the Democratic Convention in July 2004, Obama has drawn crowds wherever he has gone, inspiring and motivating the masses with lofty and soaring rhetoric. McCain, on the other hand, sends people to sleep with his stump speeches (unless, of course, he is singing songs about bombing Iran). Blogger Democrashield makes an interesting comparison, in this regard, between the Republican frontrunner in 2008 and the losing Democratic presidential nominee, John Kerry, in 2004:

“Kerry was seen as a passionateless and boring speaker, more suited to long-winded tirades in the Senate than rousing speeches on the stump; similarly, McCain is also a passionateless speaker who fails to rouse crowds of even his most ardent supporters.”

And the Guardian’s Michael Tomasky has this rather astute observation:

“Tonight's memorable moment as a television-watching experience came when CNN switched from Obama's victory speech to John McCain's. McCain started his speech before Obama finished his - a little tacky, but not a capital crime. Well, as Keith Olbermann dryly noted on MSNBC, someone needs to remind McCain that in the future he'd better speak before Obama. The Illinois Democrat was leading 18,000 attendees to fever pitch in his speech when CNN cut away. McCain, by contrast, was talking to what could have been mistaken for a bingo game in a church parish hall. The contrast was striking, and not lost on anyone imagining the two of them on a stage together at some point this fall.”

3. AGE

Senator Barack Obama is 46 years old. He will be a healthy and youthful 47 come November. Senator John McCain is 71 years old. He will be 72 come November - making him the oldest first-term president ever in the United States.

Now, of course, this quarter-century age gap could be used by McCain to remind voters of his greater experience, maturity and wisdom; on the other hand, the trend across democratic countries in the West is to pick younger politicians as party and as national leaders (from Blair to Sarkozy, from Cameron to Clegg). In a poll conducted for the New York Times and CBS television last year, just over half of Americans said the best age for a US president was the 50s. Fewer than one percent said a president in their 70s would be best.

For me, fundamentally, Obama’s relative youth fits in with his popular message of change, hope and the future. McCain’s age serves to remind voters that he was a candidate before (in 2000), that he served in a distant and unpopular former war (Vietnam) and that he could die of a heart attack (or simply ‘old age’) while sitting in the Oval Office (making his choice of vice-presidential running-mate even more crucial and relevant). Ultimately, it is difficult for someone in the eight decade of their life, with a recent history of skin cancer, and a head of white hair, to make the case for change and renewal and a fresh start – especially in a self-professed ‘young’ country like the United States!

4. INDEPENDENTS

In a close election, which November ‘08 is likely to be, the votes of independents could be crucial, if not decisive.

John McCain’s entire campaign rests – and has always rested – on his appeal to independents, his big-tent approach to politics, whereby he wins over as many (if not more) independents, waverers and even Democrats as he does Republicans. On the Democrat side, only Obama has proved that he can reach out to independents in a big way. In yesterday’s Virginia primary, two-thirds of the independents who cast their ballots in the Democratic race went for Obama over Clinton. (In fact, Obama has won more independents than Clinton in every single primary so far.)

Meanwhile, as The Nation reported, also in Virginia:

“…in the single most stunning number of the night, McCain actually lost among independents who cast their ballots in the Republican primary. His margin of victory came not from independents, but from Republicans--a terrible omen for his "electability." Huckabee also beat McCain in those bastions of independent (but also, of course, megachurch) voting, the suburbs, while Obama was pulling 60 percent of suburbanites on the other side. The other prime indicators of how independents might vote in November looked equally good for Obama and lousy for McCain: While Obama won big with under-45 voters, who are the most likely to register independent, McCain lost big among the youngest voters (under 30) while taking 47 percent of the 30-44 age group. To add just one more bit of sour news for McCain, fewer independents voted in the Republican primary in Virginia this year -- 76 percent of the voters were card-carrying GOPers, as opposed to just 63 percent in 2000.”

5. PARTY UNITY

Obama, if/when he wins the nomination, can rely on Democrats rallying around ‘their’ candidate. Only die-hard, dyed-in-the-wool partisan Clintonites – and they are, actually, few in number – will continue to question his credentials and his leadership. The rest of the Democratic Party is likely to fall in line behind him – in fact, exit polls in yesterday’s important Virginia primary showed the Illinois Senator making inroads into Hillary Clinton’s supposedly ‘core’ constituencies; the parts of the Democratic Party that those not named ‘Clinton’ had previously found difficult to reach.

As US pollster John Zogby writes:

“In addition to his momentum of victories, he has made significant inroads into constituencies that were the core of his opponent's support.

“Thus, in Virginia and Maryland, exit polls revealed that he tied with Senator Clinton among white voters, and actually defeated her among women, lower-income voters, rural voters, those over 65 years of age, Catholics, and Hispanics.”

McCain, however, is struggling to win over his party’s conservative Christian base. Despite being within spitting distance of his party’s nomination, he still seems wholly unable to win over evangelicals (not to mention influential, right-wing, talk-radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham), with rival candidate (and former pastor) Mike Huckabee still winning the occasional state (e.g. Kansas, Louisiana), and with self-professed conservative Republicans voting 51 percent for Huckabee and 35 percent for McCain in yesterday’s Virginia primary, and ‘evangelical’ Republicans splitting 61 per cent to 28 per cent in favour of Huckabee. Conservatives don’t trust McCain on the economy (he voted against the Bush tax cuts), nor on immigration (he supported President Bush’s unpopular ‘amnesty’ proposals), while evangelicals question his commitment to Christian fundamentalism and his flip-flopping on key ‘moral’ issues like abortion and homosexuality. Time magazine calls it his ‘two front battle’ – but does McCain really have the time, energy or resources to be fighting on two fronts come November, and would a Democratic nominee like Senator Clinton (who would, presumably, have her own two or even three front battle with the youth, black and anti-war wings of her own party) be the best person to capitalize on McCain’s obvious internal problem?

So, in conclusion, I do hope it is Senator Barack Obama who wins the Democratic nomination – not simply because he is the best of a bad bunch but because he is the only candidate with a real chance of beating the worst of the current bunch, Senator John “bomb, bomb, bomb” McCain. As I have said, I have serious worries about the Arizona senator, who despite his maverick image and media love-in, remains the hawk in hawk's clothing. If Obama wins the nomination, and carries on inspiring friends and foes alike, then I believe he can win the election in November, with a campaign narrative contrasting his positives with McCain’s negatives: youth versus age, the future versus the past, inspiration and hope versus tough-talk and fear-mongering. Good luck Barry!