Credit Where Credit is Due

If you lined up all the presidential hopefuls of two years ago, and arranged them in order of ideology, McCain would have appeared right in the middle, and Obama so far to the left, he was in another room; segregated, as it were. Hilary Clinton would have been one spot from McCain, to his left, or at his side (now THAT would have been a crazy VP pick, after Obama had ignored her).

So I ought to feel that my horse didn't come in. Yet I don't. I am content. McCain's choice of Palin achieved the rare double of throwing his experience argument out of the window, whilst at the same time encouraging independent voters to walk away from him. And Hilary? That smug sense of entitlement was probably the most unattractive single thing in this two-year election affair. If there was a whiff of racism in the whole process, it came from the Clintons, not the Republicans. Enuff said.

Of course, there is no reason to go bananas. “This is the most meaningful thing that has ever happened”, says Oprah Winfrey. Calm down, dear, you've overdone the slimming pills, and you are looking at America and the world through a prism of slavery, disgruntlement, and affirmative action. You could only make a bigger twerp of yourself by getting onto a stage and shouting "Payback Time!"

And there is the small matter of Obama's complete lack of experience in running anything, apart from the Harvard Law Review. You have to be slightly worried about someone whose achievements have been to get other people to vote for him, without any track record of improving their lot in life. With this election, he has taken that "risen without trace" ability to its apogee, which means that we are no longer talking about him as a "community organiser" aka race-based careerist, but as a national figure who got the Hispanics, the Jews, the patrician New Englanders and plenty of po' white folk to vote for him.

Idle likes a bit of oratory, and admires those who attempt to make a silk purse from a sow's ear with their rhetoric, even in the manner of a Kinnock or a Galloway. But where they stopped far short of any meaningful achievement, Obama has succeeded. I reckon he did this because he didn't get angry. Passionate, certainly, but persuasively consensus-building rather than narrow and chippy. The Right might very well find his policies distastefully socialist - there was no manifesto, so we'll have to wait and see - but they clearly didn't get scared by him.

I doubt he'll be a very poor president, and he's been wise to manage expectations lower, starting with his acceptance speech last night - "it may take more than one term to get there" (Where? Why, THERE, of course!). An unspecified point on the map that has everything to do with mood and temperature, and nothing to do with a measurable improvement in the lives of American citizens.

There was nothing "Audacious" about his Hope, in truth. There were enough intelligent and high-achieving blacks in the Republican ranks, notably Rice and Powell, to suggest that the way was clear for an attempt at the summit. The Democrats' problem was they always seemed to promote black racist firebrands or dodgy pastors like Jesse Jackson. The history of black mayors in Democrat cities was often depressingly sub-Saharan with tales of embezzlement, sexual voraciousness and contempt for the voter. They needed to find someone of above-average intelligence with a credible message for all America, and to produce him when the incumbent party was most vulnerable. This, they achieved. They didn't stop to think much about policy, it seems, which may be no bad thing. The last lot demonstrated that arriving in the White House with too long a wish-list doesn't necessarily make for good government.

It is undoubtedly something, for a black guy with a young family to get the keys to the motor after 43 middle-aged white men have had them. But we only care about his competence, and everyone knows he'll be an improvement on the last middle-aged white man.