America's best hopes rest on the
In his celebrated speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, the speech through which he rose to national prominence when still just a senatorial candidate for Illinois, Barack Obama thrilled his audience not only with his signature oratorical high style but by calling for a new "politics of hope". He went on to define what those new politics would be and urged the party and the nation to unite behind John Kerry, "a man who embodies the best this country has to offer".
If Mr Kerry was the best of America, his rival for the presidency in 2004, George W Bush, the incumbent in the White House, represented something much less: the politics of cynicism and despair. Mr Bush has presided over a period of calamitous decline. Under his leadership, the American ideals of freedom and democracy have been tarnished by the catastrophe of the Iraq War. American moral authority has been undermined by Guantanamo Bay, the practice of extraordinary rendition and the shameful mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
The Republican commitment to free-market fundamentalism has been exposed as bankrupt in all its rigidity by the credit crisis and the collapse of the American banking system. Under Mr Bush the national debt has nearly doubled, passing the $10trn mark for the first time, while the world's superpower has no system of universal health care. On anyone's terms the Bush administration has been an abject failure, and we have not even mentioned his record on energy policy or the environment.
John McCain, the Republican candidate, has sought to distance himself from the failed policies of the outgoing president, whom he holds in contempt. But Mr McCain still believes in American exceptionalism. "I want the 21st century to be the American century," he said recently, lapsing into the language of the past.
The Republican nominee is a man of extraordinary courage and resilience; his knowledge of foreign affairs is profound. He has the political experience Barack Obama palpably lacks. But he has run a dismal campaign. His choice of the gauche and reactionary Sarah Palin as running mate demonstrated a lack of judgement and, as he has fallen behind in the polls and the financial crisis has turned voters away from the Republicans, Mr McCain, once admired as a freethinker prepared to work with Democrats, has moved to the right. He has even equivocated on the one issue that has defined him since his return from Vietnam: his opposition to torture.
Mr Obama has made much of his own improbable life story, of how the self-described skinny kid with the funny name came to believe that "America has a place for him, too". He is an enthusiastic self-mythologiser. He has spoken of how the choices he has made "were never truly mine alone"; as if, as a mixed-race American in a country so deeply scarred by slavery - an American who chose in early adulthood to accept his inheritance as a black man and, in doing so, married an African-American woman - he wishes us to believe that the forces now carrying him to the White House are part of a larger historical process, beyond his control.
Yet Mr Obama is a career politician who is very much in control - of himself, of those around him. His self-possession is remarkable. It has been said that he has a Republican soul trapped within a Democrat's body, that he is consistent only in his inconsistency and that he speaks of liberal goals in conservative language. It is true that his tone is often cautious, measured and pragmatic, and that he has few fixed positions.
A strong criticism of him is that the closer he has come to power, the more he has moved towards the centre right from a perceived position on the left. He may have published an autobiography, but many of those who have been with him on the campaign trail (as our correspondent Alec MacGillis has been for more than a year; his remarkable report begins on page 22) do not know who he is or what he represents. He remains an enigma, a shape-shifter, perhaps too cool and reserved, too thoughtful even. He is what he has to be, at any given moment, for enough people to vote for him. Which is to say, he is a politician, and a very good one, the best in America since Bill Clinton. For now, this year, that may be enough. To elect him as president would be the equivalent of a great American wager: it would be to choose promise over hardened achievement, potential over experience. It would be to invest in talent. But if Americans are now prepared to gamble - Mr Clinton has called Mr Obama "the roll of the dice" candidate - it might be because they feel they have nothing more to lose, that the international standing of the country could not be more besmirched, and that they want someone untainted and unburdened by the past eight years.
No one can predict the kind of president Obama will be. Will he respond to the global financial crisis by embracing a form of protectionism, as Vincent Cable, writing on page 10, fears might happen? Will he adopt a multilateralist approach to foreign affairs? Will he honour the pledge he has made to engage in dialogue with President Ahmadinejad of Iran, as well as other leaders of rogue states?
What we do know is that Barack Hussein Obama remains the candidate of hope. And it is to be hoped that if he is elected as the 44th president of the United States, as we hope and expect he will be on 4 November, he will prove himself to be much more than a candidate of intelligence and thoughtfulness - that he will be, in effect, the best his great country has to offer.
