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Barack beware the 'lyrical illusion'

Obama's strategy must be to be the candidate of change - which most Americans now want - not the candidate of race

Listening at the Hay festival to a couple of historians mull over lessons to be drawn from the revolutions of 1789 and 1848 I heard one of them invoke the phrase "the lyrical illusion". I'm not sure whether David Andress or Mike Rapport used it, nor the source they were quoting. But it made me flinch and think of Barack Obama.

Why so? Lots of reasons. The pair were discussing 1848 and how the pan-European revolutionaries of that year - from Paris to Palermo, Budapest to Berlin - failed to understand the ethnic conflicts which their model of 19th century liberal nationalism would unleash.

Combined with their failure to address economic hardship created by recession for the working class, and their foolish trust of deals cut with the kings and princes who would soon launch the counter-revolution, they were soon under pressure from both left and right. Their heroic optimism crumbled.

"I feel bad, I don't have the right to criticise these people, but there is a naivety to them. They had wrung concessions from kings and thought they were sincere, that the monarchies could be trusted," I noted Andress, the historian of 1848, admitting.

I feel a bit that way about the Obama candidacy. It is remarkable that it has come as far as it has, to the point where his nomination as the Democratic candidate is all but assured. But I worry about the "lyrical illusion" that the Republicans are so unpopular over failed foreign and domestic policies that the easy bit lies ahead.

It does not, though colleagues who have attended more events at the Hay festival this year than I have report that the prevailing mood is upbeat for his candidacy, bolstered by ex-president Jimmy Carter's stirring fantasy about what the new president ought to say.

Chris Hitchens, the ex-New Statesman pundit who has made a considerable name for himself in the United States was also in Hay, where, as I reported here on Sunday, he was both brilliant and bellicose. But, in one aside, he was also darker about the coming campaign.

Obama had been tied for too long to what Hitchens called a "race-hustling ethno-nationalist cult church in Chicago" - that of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, whom he has since been forced to disown for inflammatory remarks about 9/11 ("chickens coming home to roost") and Aids (a white conspiracy).

One result was that Hillary Clinton - plus Hitch's old enemy, Bill - had resorted to barely-veiled incitement to racial prejudice.

Admittedly Senator John McCain's camp contained some very dubious pastors, including the Rev Rod Parsley (a name out of PG Wodehouse, Hitchens suggested) who was sacked after suggesting that the United States had been created by God to destroy Islam.

But a lot of Obama's problem here is his own fault, "by giving his allegiance to someone most Americans could not bear to think about" - and for 20 years too. Hitchens did not say this, but I am told that Oprah Winfrey cut her ties with Wright 10 years ago.

Wright has since been on the warpath, adding to the candidate's grief for reasons not properly explained. If that wasn't enough, remember that the old egotist Ralph Nader is planning to split the Democratic vote in several states.

Another friend, Professor Norman Birnbaum, a now-old leftwing European emigre to the green pastures of US academe, sent me a copy the other day of articles he has written for Prospect and the Political Quarterly.

Unlike Hitch he remains a recognisible European leftwinger, though he is equally scornful of the prevailing tone of his adopted country. Thus:

"When the intellectually and morally feeble present incumbent ran against two far more substantial opponents, Gore and then Kerry, prominent commentators praised him as a person with whom one could drink beer.

"Bush had gone to Yale but could be absolved of the suspicion that he spent much time there reading, but Gore and Kerry were alarmingly capable of thinking in ideas of more than one syllable.

"That too many of our commentators are themselves ignorant and lazy explains their choice - but insofar as voters shared their preferences, the choice casts an unflattering light on our national cultural level."

But Birnbaum takes the coming contest seriously and suggests that either man could win. John McCain, the PoW war hero, is the scion of a military family whose idea of the imperial, hegemonic American presidency is, if anything, even more inflated than Bush's.

But the Bush legacy is to have left significant parts of the military disaffected from the president's incompetent record. So are significant elements of the business and professional classes, dismayed by economic mismanagement.

The chance is there to build a progressive coalition which includes the centre and the left, committed to cooperation and multilateralism abroad, fairer taxes and better public services at home. Obama's strategy must be to be the candidate of change - which most Americans now want - not the candidate of race.

All good stuff and I'd love to believe it. But beware of the lyrical illusion. Hitchens predicts the most racially polarised election since 1968, when Governor George Wallace of Alabama went hunting those blue collar white voters who have clung to Mrs Clinton. Nixon won.

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