Obama or McCain?

We had a very interest-ing and pleasant inter-action last Thursday noon with Dr. David Plotke, a political scientist from the United States. Eight columnists from different broadsheets were invited by the Public Affairs office of the US Embassy to ask questions regarding the tight presidential contest that should culminate on the first Tuesday of November. Some three weeks before, we were also invited to a tele-conference with another political science professor, but that encounter was spoiled by inane questions fielded by of all people, a Comelec commissioner who kept asking a clueless American professor about the crazy situation of Philippine elections. The American must have wondered in bewilderment if elections in their true sense really happen in these benighted parts.

Of course we know that our elections are far from being fair or clean or democratic, but it made me cringe in shame that we had a commissioner who thought he was addressing Virgilio Garcillano and Roque Bello instead of a political expert from a country where democracy is real and voters make informed choices. The kind of characters an illegitimate president has appointed to the Comelec fortifies my belief that she has no real desire for any kind of honorable legacy.

Dr. Plotke started by saying that McCain was probably the best choice the Republicans could make, given a field of contenders which included far-right, or far too conservative candidates that would not attract any independent voters. He narrowed down the swing-vote states to Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida and Nevada. Most of the other states have predictably fallen behind one or the other party and candidate this early.

Had the US Senate not approved the 700 billion dollar bailout package for the ailing financial market, Obama would already be a sure winner, Dr. Plotke said. This is not to say that the pendulum has swung towards McCain. It simply means that he cannot be written off this early. In any case, the vote margin should be some 3 to 5 percent close if Obama prevails, and less if McCain squeaks in. The latest polls, taken after Bush announced the bailout package proposed by US Treasury Secretary Paulson and the Federal Reserve Board’s Bernanke, and before the Biden-Palin debate, showed Obama seven points ahead of rival McCain. If Obama gets Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan, he is already a winner. McCain has to get these three swing states, and more, including Florida, where Bush narrowly beat, and quite controversially, Al Gore eight years ago.

With a month to go, a seven-point lead could be erased only by monumental blunders on the part of the Democrats and their Obama. Although much attention has been drawn to the vice-presidential race, principally because of the novelty of Sarah Palin, in truth, Americans don’t vote separately for their vice-presidents, unlike in our stupid system. And the vice-presidential candidates’ influence, plus or minus, push or pull, on the presidential candidate is really rather small, a max, according to Dr. Plotke, of 5 percent. Thus, as we observed in our "Lemons" article last Thursday, a sweet-smelling Palin gave McCain a 4 to 5 percent boost in the ratings, right after she was introduced in the Republican convention. Now let’s see how Palin’s "substance" compares with Joe Biden. (As of this writing, I had not yet seen their televised debate.)
There are two major issues where Obama and McCain will be weighed by the voters of America. One is the economy. And while McCain is not an economic conservative, he represents a political party dominated by conservatives. The fact that their dogma of unbridled free market economics and a social philosophy of "trickle-down", best enunciated by Ronald Reagan a generation ago, has unravelled makes it more difficult for John McCain to convince worried Americans that their future is brighter under a McCain-Republican leadership. The Democrats just have to reason to death that the collapse of Wall Street happened under the Republican watch, and they have to paint the tar on McCain.

Contrarily, Obama has been spouting the advocacies that touch an emotional response in times of dire straits. His passion for universal health care and for education are not so much motherhood, as they are basic needs that the middle-class and the poor desire and believe they deserve.

The other is foreign policy. While McCain sustains the Bush administration on this, Obama has been forthright about ending the military engagement in Iraq. Obama just has to balance off the worries of international terrorism consistently bannered by the neo-cons in the Bush-Cheney maladministration, as against the average American’s aversion to huge military spending to prop its government’s penchant for being constable of the universe. I expressed concern about the effects on Obama of say, a crazy attack by Iran’s Ahmadinejad on say, Israel a week or so before E-Day, and Dr. Plotke acknowledged this as a negative against Obama’s gaining bandwagon. However he says Obama has been very wise in expressing his open support for Israel, and this has fortified the Jewish faith in the Democratic Party to which they have historically been in support.

Racism is of course a continuing undercurrent, but Dr. Plotke says this is perhaps minimal, considering that America has become increasingly multi-racial, and the states where such racist tendencies still exist have already been counted this early to the Republicans’ account. Remember that the American electoral system, unlike ours, is not a question of absolute numerical advantage, but winning 270 electoral votes in the electoral college, based on a winner-take-all state victory. Thus small Connecticut will always vote Democrat and so will huge New York, just as Kentucky and Texas are on the Republican counter.

The beauty of the American system of presidential choice lies in the transparency by which issues of fitness, issues of character, as much as defining positions on genuine issues, are debated over and over again a full year before voters make their decision.

Every candidate’s life becomes an open book, and by this I mean as much his religious convictions or zealotry, his marital fidelity as much as his peccadilloes, his business dealings and his voting record in Congress or his performance or lack of the same in state or local administration.

And while so-called political handlers and their army of creative people can churn out ads to highlight the good and try to paper over the bad, in the end, people get to see through the blather. And make informed choices, for better or for worse.

Which is why I recommended in two successive articles on this space early this year that would-be presidential moist-eyes should be subjected as early as possible to rigorous examination, through debates and other fora which would show their fitness for the highest position in the land of the benighted. Will they, by conviction, principle and character, bring light, or will they just plunge us deeper into the benighted state we have been plunged into through all these years?

Let us begin the winnowing process. Dismiss the chaff and limit our choices to the true grain.