TWO weeks hence, the world will be waiting with the proverbial bated breath for the result of the US presidential election. At the moment, any number of American pollsters and pundits are willing to wager their reputations on the likelihood that, on November 5, the world will be greeted with the news it desperately wishes to hear: namely that the junior senator from Illinois has been elevated to the status of president-elect. But, to paraphrase Harold Wilson, two weeks is an eternity in politics, and it would be a mistake to write off the senior senator from Arizona just yet.

 

There can be little question, though, that it has lately been a rough ride for John McCain. At his third and final debate with Barack Obama, the Republican nominee  tried very hard to maintain a benign visage throughout the proceedings. Unfortunately for him, the supposed smile came across as more of a smirk, and his pale, constipated demeanour offered a telling contrast to his rival’s  the confident, suave cool.

 

Only a killer blow in that debate would substantially have altered McCain’s prospects. In the event, he could come up only with Joe the Plumber: a voter whom Obama had encountered recently in Holland, Ohio. Joe Wurzelbacher wanted to know whether the Democratic candidate would increase his taxes. Joe claims annual earnings of $250,000, and Obama, to his credit, didn’t say no. He expressed a preference for “spread[ing] the wealth around”.

 

The very idea of redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor is anathema to the Republicans (although they have no serious objection to the reverse process), and they pounced on Obama’s pronouncement as evidence of his socialist inclinations. A spot of socialism would do the vast majority of Americans no harm. However, to insinuate that Obama intends to be the vehicle for a transition away from neoliberalism is, regrettably, a gross exaggeration. At best, he can be expected to marginally redress the imbalances overemphasized by George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the extraordinarily rich.

 

Unfortunately for McCain, Joe the Plumber can hardly be characterized as an Ordinary Joe, or even as a regular plumber: as Obama subsequently pointed out, there are unlikely to be many plumbers who rack up a cool quarter of a million dollars a year. What’s more, Wurzelbacher evidently owes some money to the Internal Revenue Service, and there are also other discrepancies in his narrative. As in the case of Sarah Palin, it appears that the McCain campaign didn’t look too closely at Joe before signposting him as an epitome of the Obama-sceptical voter.

 

This may seem like an insensible approach, but it’s not entirely illogical: in their desperation, the Republicans are clutching at straws. Palin herself was one such thistle, and although McCain has re-appropriated the limelight after allowing her to pretend for a while that she, rather than he, was the Republican nominee, the Alaskan governor continues to relish her role as an attack dog. She has been focusing particularly on Obama’s acquaintanceship with William Ayers, a University of Illinois professor who, some 40 years ago, was a founding member of a group known as the Weather Underground.

 

This is tantamount, in Palin’s eyes, to “pallin’ around with terrorists”, and at least one state Republican leader has gone as far as to suggest that Obama’s relationship with Ayers means he’s in the same league as Osama bin Laden. (Coincidentally or otherwise, several hundred of the postal ballots sent out to potential early voters named the Democratic option as “Barack Osama”, supposedly a typographical error.)

 

Obama has responded that his casual relationship with Ayers, a prominent educationist who 11 years ago was named as Chicago’s Citizen of the Year, hardly amounted to an endorsement of the Weathermen. At the time Obama was about eight years old, Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, did indeed sign up to an organization sworn to violence. The Weather Underground was a minuscule offshoot of the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS, which was at the forefront of popular opposition to the American aggression against Vietnam. 

 

The Weathermen – who acquired their nomenclature from a line in a Bob Dylan song, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”  – had witnessed the peaceful movement for civil rights that culminated in the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, and the non-violent antiwar movement that had gathered momentum without affecting the conduct of the conflict in Vietnam. They decided that violence against the state perpetrating such atrocities at home and abroad was a perfectly reasonable course of action.

 

This may have been a seriously wrongheaded and, ultimately, self-defeating conclusion, but the analysis it stemmed from made good sense at the time and does not seem particularly jarring 40 years on, not least in view of the tendency among many Americans to ignore the lessons of their nation’s grotesque role in Indochina (in which McCain was a proud participant). Notwithstanding Palin’s rantings, there is, unfortunately, no evidence that Obama is comfortable with this analysis. Had it been otherwise, chances are that his approach to Afghanistan and Pakistan would have been a great deal more enlightened.

 

Ayers and Dohrn have, sensibly, avoided public comment since their association with Obama was highlighted by Hillary Clinton back in March.  Meanwhile, the Democrats have not dwelt inordinately on McCain’s past, which has included a seat on the advisory board of the US Council for World Freedom – in the words of the New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg, “the American outpost of the World Anti-Communist League, a sort of clearing house for former Nazi collaborators, Central American death-squad leaders, and assorted international thugs”.

 

They have also not made much of Palin and her husband’s links with the leading Alaskan secessionist party, or of her relationship with the lunatic fringe of Christian fundamentalism. However, should the Republicans overcome their reluctance thus far to invoke Obama’s ties to the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, a radical preacher who questions American domestic and overseas policies on moral grounds, chances are the Democrats won’t be able to resist the temptation to excoriate Palin for her susceptibility to anti-witchcraft sermon s from a priest who makes Wright seem like the epitome of compassionate commonsense.

 

Obama was arguably boosted last Sunday by an endorsement from Bush’s first-term secretary of state, Colin Powell, who was himself once touted as the African-American likeliest to become president. He discredited himself thoroughly by standing by Bush for four disastrous years, but appears to have recognized the error of his ways. Let us hope that at least some of the Americans who voted twice for George W. will, similarly, not repeat their unforgiveable error.

 

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