President Barack Obama of USA

After 18 months of gruelling campaign, the American presidential race will be over in a few days - on Nov 4. Thank God for that.

I have been following the election campaign more closely than any previous presidential race in the US by reading up the yards and yards of reports and analysis in the newspapers, especially the New York Times and the Guardian online first thing in the morning everyday. By now, I am positively information-fatigued on this subject.

But you know how it is. When the United States of America coughs, the world catches a cold. Who gets into the White House next January will have an impact on the rest of the world one way or another. In these gloomy days of a global financial meltdown, and troubled sports smouldering in potential conflicts, we - though we cannot vote - cannot help but cast our anxious gaze upon the American presidential election.

I am rooting for Barack Obama, not because of his skin colour, but because he seems more inclusive, more intelligent, more conciliatory, and far more promising in bringing changes to the American foreign policy. Indeed, the world cannot afford another four years of the Republican brand of American unilateralism.

Of all the political actors on the American stage right now, the one person I find most unpalatable is the Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. The only Palin I like is Michael Palin, the indomitable member of the famous British comedy group Monty Python. Side by side, Michael would make Sarah look intellectually challenged. He also speaks much better English than she does.

At this moment, Barack Obama is ahead of John McCain in most polls across the US, including those states which are traditionally strongholds of the Republican. It looks like Barack Obama is going to win on Nov 4, which will be Nov 5 in Malaysia.

But polls are polls, and they are not the actual elections. There are a great number of variables in this presidential election, and whether the polls can take all of them into account is questionable. We will know for sure only after Wednesday next week.

There are other indicators though.

Ordinary folks back Obama

The first is the phenomenal amount of money that has been raised by the Democrats. Up till now, they have received donations amounting to over US$600 million! The significant fact is that about 60% of these massive funds come from donors who give US$100 or less, mostly through the internet.

That means there are many ordinary small people giving massive collective support to Obama where it matters: the pocket book. That is real political support, of which I know more than a little from personal experience in my time.

When the campaign of the presidential candidate is fuelled by small donations from a large number of individual citizens, instead of large donations from a few super-rich groups, he will not be beholden to those vested interest groups in the American military-industrial complex and their lobbyists in Washington - once he assumes office.

With that kind of war chest available to him, Obama can buy a lot of campaign TV ads, especially in these last days of the election in swing states.

More importantly, the seemingly limitless campaign funds have allowed Obama to build up an awesome formidable campaign machinery on the ground.

In America and in every country where free and fair elections are held, organisation is the key to an electoral victory.

You need a core of campaign managers, strategists, publicists, and an army of countless foot-soldiers to pound the pavement and knock on doors to meet voters individually, to persuade them to your cause, and to ensure they actually go to vote on polling day. Say what you like about the merits and demerits of various modes of campaign, door-to-door personal contact is still the most effective means of securing votes.

Considering the huge size of the United States and her equally huge population of some 260 million people, the problems to be encountered in mounting a national presidential campaign and the campaign at state level in all 51 states can only boggle the mind. It does require a lot of money!

By all accounts, with his well-oiled campaign machinery, Obama's campaign managers are talking about mobilising six million volunteers and paid workers on Nov 4 to get voters out to vote. Their local campaign offices everywhere outnumber the Republicans by a margin of three or four to one.

Writing in the Guardian (29.10.2008), James Ridgeway observed in his column article entitled Obama's army determined to get out the vote:

"Johm McCain's campaign offices tend to be sparsely populated, according to Quinn, and they "are also calm, sedate. Little movement. No hustle. In the Obama offices, it's a whirlwind. People move. It's a dynamic bustle ... You could take every McCain volunteer we've seen doing actual work in the entire trip, over six states, and it would add up to the same as Obama's single Thornton, Colorado office.'"

As the actual day of reckoning approaches, every commentator is talking about the racial implication of this election if Obama wins. Others opine about a repeat of the Bradley Effect.

Meanwhile, the whole world is holding its breath to see whether the United States of America will elect her first Afro-American president, after a history of slavery, and the memory of cruel and inhuman racial discrimination that gave birth to Martin Luther King's Civil Rights Movement.

An emblem of renewal

I got a jolt from my good friend Otto Steinmayer, an American and a perennial resident of Lundu in Sarawak. He pointed out to me that Barack Obama is not a black American; he is an American of mixed parentage. A child born to a white mother and a black father ought to be neither white nor black. The portrayal of Barack Obama as "black" is itself indicative of prevailing American prejudice on the ridiculous concept of racial purity.

But at least, racial consciousness is changing in the US. According to most polls, Barack Obama enjoys more support among white voters than his Democratic predecessors, Al Gore in 2000, and John Kerry in 2004. According to the recent most New York Times - CBS poll, Obama has a one point lead over McCain among white men and women below the age of 45.

Noting that the American luster as a political brand name has dimmed, the New York Times columnist Roger Cohen saw the rise of Obama's political stature as an emblem of renewal. In a piece entitled American Stories ( NYT 29.10.2008), he wrote:

"Nowhere else could a 47-year-old man, born, as he has written, of a father "black as pitch" and a mother "white as milk," a generation distant from the mud shacks of western Kenya, raised for a time as Barry Soetoro (his stepfather's family name) in Muslim Indonesia, then entrusted to his grandparents in Hawaii - nowhere else could this Barrack Hussein Obama rise so far and so fast."

"So it is important to step back, from the last machinations of this endless campaign, and think again about what America is.

"It is renewal, the place where impossible stories get written.

"It is the overcoming of history, the leaving behind of war and barriers, in the name of a future freed from the cruel gyre of memory.

"It is re-invention, the absorption of one identity in something larger - the notion that "out of many, we are truly one."

"It is a place better than Bush's land of shadows where a leader entrusted with the hopes of the earth cannot find within himself a solitary phrase to uplift the soul.

"Multiple polls now show Obama with a clear lead. But nobody can know the outcome and nobody should underestimate the immense psychological leap that sending a black couple to the White House would represent."

Watching from half way round the globe, Malaysians tend to see America through stereotypic glasses. Politically, I dare say that public opinions in our country would be mostly adverse to the US as a nation, particularly after the eight years under Bush's rule.

We tend to forget that the United States of America is a huge country with vast tracts of real estate peopled by a huge population of fast changing demographic composition. It is a very complex country.

True enough, there is the culture war between the blue and the red blocs of American voters. There is the rift between the liberals and the conservatives. Then there are the many shades of independents making up 40% of the entire electorate in between. But the boundaries are constantly shifting.

Eventually, Obama may win by a landslide victory, as predicted by Professor Fred Thompson in Malaysiakini, partly because of their strange system of Electoral College that has nothing to do with education.

That would be very gratifying to me as a Malaysian. At least, in his entire 21-month campaign period, Barack Obama has never used race as an issue.

That is something that Malaysian politicians and voters can learn from! We too must free ourselves from the bondage of race-based politics.

---

SIM KWANG YANG was Bandar Kuching member of parliament from 1982-1995. He can be reached at kenyalang578@yahoo.com