Down to the wire

Obama poised to deliver the dream


The sight of thousands of white people cheering a black man to the White House is one that most Americans never thought they’d see

AMERICAN IN IRELAND
Sheila Sullivan

EVEN the donkeys in Dookinella know it’s Election Day – they’ve been eyeing me down at the gate in an alert and inquisitive way. And since the donkey is the symbol of the Democratic Party, I’m taking their  sudden interest in me as a sign that Barack Obama is going to win. At this stage it’s as reasonable a way to predict the result as any.
Today is an emotional day for Democrats in Ireland such as myself, and a nerve-wracking one at that. I’m wary after the Republican victories in 2000 and 2004, which led to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the global financial crisis. The last eight years of George Bush have been long and genuinely tragic.
This time around, like many Americans abroad, I’m feeling a mixture of excitement and pride, as well as fear and anxiety. One Boston Globe headline called it ‘The Democrats’ case of the jitters’. I’m worried about Obama’s personal safety and I don’t trust the polls, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed. Can you blame me?
During the primaries I was a Hillary Clinton supporter, not because she is a woman but because she was the most formidable candidate in either party, with the most impressive command of issues. She advocates universal healthcare and she outshone her rivals (who happened to be men) in most of the debates. And living in Achill, 3,000 miles away from the United States, I wasn’t suffering from Clinton fatigue. Hillary could be president for eight years, I thought, and then Barack could take his turn.
But it was not to be. Obama ran a better, tighter, more disciplined campaign during which he gave beautiful, soaring speeches which raised the roofs and made Americans sit up and take notice. They forgot about his skin colour and listened to his message of hope and unity. His staff understood mass media, particularly the power of television and the internet, and the importance of keeping things simple.
Too simple, I thought. ‘Yes We Can’ and ‘Change We Need’ are pretty vague slogans – even empty and meaningless to many observers – but the truth is that they worked. Obama won the Democratic nomination and then was able to use his talents, his high intelligence, his great education and his advisers’ flawless tactics against John McCain and Sarah Palin, who conducted a negative campaign during which they both seemed out of their depth.
Above all, throughout this lengthy contest, Obama displayed a remarkably even temperament, and even the most ardent Hillary supporter would have to concede that, over the long haul, he has been a very cool customer indeed. Writing in the New York Times, columnist David Brooks said: “We’ve been watching Barack Obama for two years now, and in all that time there hasn’t been a moment in which he has publicly lost his self-control.”
Well, there was that awkward moment during one of the debates when Obama said ‘You’re likeable enough, Hillary’, where he offended her supporters and seemed to reveal a surly side, but it appeared to have been a rare lapse. Otherwise he has appeared unflappable and poised – ‘self-contained, self-controlled and maybe even a little dull’, as Brooks put it – with an enviable capacity to rise above the fray.
So, do we have a reason to be hopeful today? I think so. If Obama wins, it will be a triumph of his temperament over the racial tension that plagued America’s past. It will be very important, for America and the world, to have an African-American President of the United States. It will be inspiring to watch African-Americans vote for him as Irish-Americans once did for John Kennedy, and it will be equally moving to watch millions of white Americans vote for him too – not because he’s black, but because they see him as the best person to lead them out of war and recession.
He has transcended the race issue, and that is his greatest accomplishment. The most striking image of the campaign has been the sight of thousands upon thousands of white people cheering, clapping, smiling and waving signs, ecstatic to be in Obama’s presence. It was simply inconceivable in the America in which I grew up.
I have a distant memory, as a child in Boston, of President Kennedy ordering troops to go to the University of Alabama in 1963. Two black students were planning to enrol there, but Governor George Wallace, a white man and a segregationist, was trying to stop them. He literally stood in the doorway to block their way. JFK sent in the National Guard, Wallace stepped aside and the black students walked through the door of the university. History was made.
That was only 45 years ago. And history may be made again today.
So I salute Barack Obama’s courage, and I think of his parents, both deceased, particularly his mother Ann, who died of cancer in November 1995. She was a white American anthropology student at the University of Hawaii who was married briefly to another very bright student, Barack Obama Snr from Kenya, in the early 1960s. According to Time magazine, Ann then spent nearly 20 years, between jobs, writing a 1,000-page thesis on Indonesia. She opposed bigotry in all forms and thought that service was the true measure of a life. Her son has written that ‘what is best in me I owe to her’.
On such a day thoughts turn to the lines of a poem by Langston Hughes, an African-American poet who lived from 1902 to 1967. In ‘Let America Be America Again’, Hughes evokes an American dream impossible for so many to achieve, a theme close to Obama’s heart. And yet the dream never dies. Towards the end of the poem, the poet proclaims: “O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath – America will be!”
Sheila Sullivan is an Irish Times journalist and author of ‘Follow the Moon:A Memoir’ (Currach Press, 2006).

McCain hoping for a miracle


John McCain has a clear record on the issue of immigration but likely victor Barack Obama has yet to make his intentions clear

IRISHMAN IN AMERICA
Ciarán Staunton

ALL the polls are suggesting that Barack Obama will be the next President of the United States – and many of them now believe he will be the President with a landslide victory.
However, John McCain’s supporters have not given up hope just yet although most will admit that the Republican will need to win all the of the swing states – and that is a big ask at this stage.
The one unknown, which the Obama campaign is adamant will not be a factor, but could well be, is what the media have termed here in the States ‘The Bradley Effect’. The concept is based on former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley’s unsuccessful race for governor of California in 1982.
Though initial polls showed the African-American candidate ahead of his opponent, George Deukmejian, by as much as seven points in the week before the election, Bradley lost the race. Pollsters theorised that some white voters said they would support Bradley but did the opposite once they got into the voting booth.
That, of course, was 26 years ago and America is a very different place now so it remains to be seen if race will become an issue at all on polling day. Obama’s wife Michelle was adamant on CNN last week that the polls are reflecting the truth on the ground across America.
“If there was going to be a Bradley effect, or it was going to be in play, Barack wouldn’t be the nominee,” she said. “We have to focus on the country as it is. That was several decades ago. And I think that there’s been growth and movement.”
For the Irish, it has been easier to side with McCain because he has a clear policy on immigration and that has been stated directly to us.
However, Senator Obama has only been a senator for two years so he hasn’t much of a record on things like immigration and, with the economy dominating the election, it has been hard to get issues like immigration discussed in any real detail.
Senator Obama does, however, have plenty of Irish-American advisers as part of his Democratic set-up so if he does win the election, there is a hope that the matter can be discussed in some depth.
However, while it is unlikely we will see a major bill like Kennedy/McCain, there will very definitely be immigration legislation in the next Congress, which will almost certainly be better disposed to it than the outgoing one.
ILIR (Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform), through its lobbyist Bruce Morrison and the Irish Government, will be keeping a very close eye on what transpires when the Congress comes back in January.
A tough battle lies ahead, but we knew that when ILIR began its campaign almost three years ago.
There has also been concern expressed due to the fact that Senator Obama has stated that he wants to bring a lot of America companies which are based overseas back to America and this could effect Ireland adversely. But again, he has not elaborated much on the issue and it seems unlikely that major industries would be pulled directly out of Ireland having had such a long association with the areas in question.
All in all, it looks likely that Obama will win and herald a new political dawn in America but because of the nature of the Electoral College system, it may end up being a lot closer than everyone thinks. One expert on CNN played out a scenario today where both men finished on 269 votes. It still yet could go right to the wire.

Ciarán Staunton is a Louisburgh-born businessman who owns O’Neill’s Irish Bar in Manhattan, New York. He is also Vice-Chairman of the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform (ILIR).