Erica Grieder follows the US Presidential campaign
My favourite souvenir from the campaign season is a nine-page handout on ‘The Nature & Activity of Demons’. This was provided during a sort of adult Sunday school at John Hagee’s mega-church in San Antonio, Texas. Mike Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas and Baptist pastor and candidate for the Republican nomination, was there for a guest-preaching stint, and gave a colourful explanation of why we should strive to be less like Herod and more like Jesus. It was sound advice, but perhaps not as immediate as the lesson that preceded it. Satan is engaged in guerrilla warfare: his minions systematically invade the populace, and infect us with their ideologies. They will look like innocents, and will blame the government for any unrest. They are not sportsmanlike and will ‘employ any scheme to win the loyalty of the people (harass, sabotage, terror)’. They ‘manipulate the populace thru terror and misinformation to remain anonymous’, and ‘no cost is too high for victory’. It is an invaluable resource. I am thinking of sending it to the McCain campaign.
October is the ugly season in American politics, and it is uglier than usual this time around. No one feels good about the final weeks of this election. Among my Democratic friends there are endless jokes about Sarah Palin, but the undercurrent is nervy and anxious. Obama has maintained a lead in the polls these past few weeks, but everyone seems to suspect a trick. The Republicans have no jokes, only awkward silences and averted glances. The candidate of honour is not at his best at the moment.
If you shake the branches a bit you can find any kind of voter you want, including people who will vote for McCain because they are also named John. I met Debbie Morris at a gun show in Irmo, South Carolina during the Republican primary there. Debbie certifies students who want a permit to carry a concealed weapon — a particularly important precaution for women, she assured me — and had set out a bowl of candy to attract passers-by. She had a particular animus against Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, who was running for the Republican nomination. ‘I have been on the web and I know that Mitt don’t know the difference between a rifle, a shotgun and an assault rifle,’ she said. ‘If he don’t know the difference, that scares me.’
Howlers aside, patterns emerge. I heard the following objection to Obama over and over, from Democrats during the primaries, and Republicans throughout: ‘He’s a good speaker,’ full stop, with contempt or scepticism. I thought this would be the fatal critique. It’s simple, it isn’t a desperate grab at any racial or generational or cultural anxieties, and most importantly, it’s fair. Obama might be the greatest human being of all time, but what has he done, other than inspire some people? And what has he inspired them to do, other than to vote for him? But I fear McCain has squandered this line of attack. Spend a few minutes splashing around in Palin’s river of gibberish, attacks and winks and a good speaker is more than good enough. Every time she talks I’m tempted to take another slug of the Obama Kool-Aid.
Obama supporters congratulated themselves for having taken down Hillary Clinton; a David vs Goliath, Apple vs Microsoft scenario. But in the race for the Democratic nomination there was always something inevitable about Obama — not necessarily that he would win, but that he would be a top contender, and that his noble travails against the Clinton machine would underline his victory or sanctify his defeat.
On the Republican side, though, there were surprise contenders in Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul. No one would have predicted either of them. Paul, a strict libertarian Republican from the Texas coast, wanted to end the war in Iraq and return to the gold standard. His policies were abstemious, and his manner constantly aggrieved. Most of his supporters were perfectly normal, but there were some more interesting ones. I was queuing for coffee in an independent bookstore in Austin and the man next to me explained that he fervently supported Mr Paul, but, as a convicted felon, he had lost the right to vote. Because of these handicaps, Paul was often treated as a joke candidate, the Right’s equivalent to Dennis Kucinich. But he placed second in Nevada and Montana, and raised oodles of money. There is a market in America for a candidate like him, and I would expect to see one in 2012 or 2016.
Huckabee was my favourite candidate on either side for fun and excitement. He is an immensely talented politician, a gifted communicator who could sell a bark collar to a beagle, as he would say. During the Republican primaries he might launch into what seemed to be an innocuous anecdote about settling in the recliner with a bowl of popcorn to watch the Razorbacks, the University of Arkansas’s football team, and by the end I would be about ready to accept some new take on things — say, the narcissism and hubris of the theory of evolution. He went on The Colbert Report, a late-night comedy show, and played air hockey with a puck shaped like Texas days before the primary there, and travelled the country with Chuck Norris, the ageing martial arts star. At Huckabee’s Super Tuesday results party in Little Rock I was impressed to meet a family with nine home-schooled children, until I met their friends. Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar had 17 children at the time (the 18th is scheduled to arrive in January) and had piled on to the family bus and driven through a tornado to be there. Their man did well that night, splitting the social conservative vote with Mitt Romney. But Republicans were anxious to see their race settled. Before the Texas primary a rancher from Sonora explained to me why he would be supporting McCain: ‘I damn sure don’t want Obama or Hillary. You don’t want to get ’em split up too much, where the Democrats can catch up.’
That attitude hurt Huck’s chances, but there’s room for someone like him the next time around, too. Palin looks likely on paper, but her presentation has been so awful that I doubt it will be her. That’s one upside of this ugly October.
Erica Grieder is the Texas correspondent for the Economist.