Obama will be seen to be on the right side of history

November 14, 2012

by W Scott Thompson*

THE only reason there was any suspense is because the good pollsters intended to confuse. The “17 per cent likelihood” that Barack Obama wouldn’t win the Electoral College simply didn’t exist.

The 17 serious pollsters knew he had a lock of better than 1 per cent in each poll so they simply added that up to keep the hopeful jokesters on the other side off balance. Did you notice that the state-by-state predictions were precisely right?

Now it is true, that I didn’t get my landslide and government will remain divided. But look: a new president doesn’t come in alone, he brings 3,000 or so with him that have various constitutional or political responsibilities to carry out. You want Karl Rove’s people or Rahm Emmanuel’s? We aren’t spending the next year either, with Congress again trying to resist the Obama programme; Obama is simply applying lessons learned already so his people, who’ve spent four anguishing years, can apply these gains as they move ahead, throwing into the dustbin of history these “theories” of government whereby if you make the really rich people at the top feel even more comfortable, they’d invest more and every one would benefit.

Now apart from the illogicality there’s also the “how does it look” aspect. It looks pretty awful. What had always made America look good, even to inspire, was precisely that it was never a zero-sum game, until Rove, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush et al discovered that they really could get away with it, not to mention the destruction of Baghdad.

Now the curious fact about this campaign is that the Republican nominee arguably couldn’t have cared less. An amiable and smart guy, he was the first nominee with no agenda since Franklyn Roosevelt — but who for his part had got one fast in 1932 and wrote most of the political history for three generations.

It looked like Mitt Romney’s advisers would see an opening in the middle, and would say “give them a little more of that Massachusetts stuff”, and Romney would say “sure, sure, why not? If its free give them two.”

If his vice-presidential candidate would worry about how this looked, Romney would say, “we’re going to get rid of Planned Parenthood”, which was news to a lot of Americans who relied on it. He thought his smile, economic success story, and general “hail fellow well met” would prevail.

But on the other side, there was no choice of agenda; there were ways to accomplish the agenda which had been formulated and made more precise over four years.

The Republicans also seemed to rely on “feel good” factors. Get ahead of the President of the United States and all would be well. Obama was relying on thousands of poll and resident trackers, not airy puffs of wind.

Anyone who saw that Obama machine get into action last Tuesday knew the field-watchers, working from their own houses, would be down soon to pick up undecided voters, who wouldn’t remain undecided much longer. Obama likes to come in for a crafted kill, that has been thought out, agreed upon, and then celebrated. It isn’t much different from the raid that got Osama bin Laden.

There’s something else that needs to be celebrated. All those billions that the Koch brothers and their kind promised to deliver for a final knock out of liberalism may have found that huge checks didn’t have the same effect as multiple small donations; they’re not even easy to administer.

I think Obama’s first term will be remembered for the careful establishment of a strategy and the means to carry it out, with perhaps a bit of smugness knowing that the other side wouldn’t ever even be able to play catch-up. And on the foreign policy side to give “The Donald” the drubbing he deserved, as the only one there knowing what was happening on the precisely opposite side of the world.

Second terms may be “lame duck” terms, but that’s not all they can be. Continuing thoughtful new programmes, letting beneficiaries do the pushing for more immigration reform, making America see that this is the turning point … that’s where we are right now: Waiting to knock out Tea Party forces everywhere and getting on with it.

We now are a multi-ethnic great adult country led by a man who is bound to be seen as on the right side of history.

*W Scott Thompson is emeritus professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, United States