Even in Kansas

You might remember Howard Dean. He’s the former five-term governor of liberal Vermont, current chair of the Democratic National Committee. In mid January 2004, he seemed just inches away from becoming his party’s presidential nominee. Polling thirty points clear in the key primary state of New Hampshire, running ahead all over the country. His unequivocal stance against the war in Iraq resonated with the activist base of the party, far more influential in the internet era than ever before. Via his website, ordinary people were donating small amounts in unprecedented numbers to the campaign. The phenomenon was evident enough to gain a name that entered the lexicon: netroots. With the support of his energetic believers and net legions, Dean had for months borne the mantle of frontrunner.

The winsome cornbelt state of Iowa had other ideas. In the angry public stoush between Dean and unionist candidate Dick Gephardt over the weeks leading up to election day in Iowa, both were casualties. Dean finished third in the caucuses behind John Kerry and John Edwards. Above the roar of a crowd that could hardly be heard on television, he bellowed a concession, and it sounded to America like a squeal. A month and two losing primaries later, he was out of the race. Kerry was the presumptive nominee. The Democrats closed ranks.

Nothing like that happened in 2008. Well, the frontrunner again came third in Iowa, but Hillary Clinton won a reprieve five days later in New Hampshire (following her husband in 1992, they called her the Comeback Kid, though in the face of post-Iowa polling she looked more like Lazarus). Thus the race see-sawed into February, to D-Day, Super Tuesday, when not quite half the nation declared their intentions. All expectations had been for a decisive day. It was anything but, honours were declared even, and the race ran on. Barack Obama won ravaged Louisiana and red Kansas, romped home in the beltway primary (DC, Virginia, Maryland), and completed February with a runaway victory in Wisconsin. Not only was he the front-runner, most analysts also believed he had the nomination—but they would await the results of Ohio and Texas before crowning him.

The Democratic choice for president is inevitably an agonised one. Just as for Dean and Clinton, Obama’s front-runner status proved a curse. He fought Texas to a draw, winning on delegates but losing the symbolically important popular vote. He was trounced in Ohio. So Clinton claimed the day. The candidates rejoined a battle that had already continued a month longer than anyone projected. Now, yawning in front of a surprisingly attentive national audience, was six weeks without any significant contest. Pennsylvania, the enormous eastern swing state with demographics as diverse as cosmopolitan Philly and the northern ranges of Appalachia, would not weigh in until 22 April.

You have to appreciate that CNN talks politics almost twenty-four hours a day. The politically interested class in America, much larger and more varied than its Australian equivalent, is omnivorous. To sate a terrible appetite, it has embraced the internet. In 2008, a butterfly can flutter its wings in the bayous of Alabama, be picked up on Marc Ambinder’s blog and see a three-point dip in national polling. Six weeks without a contest became like a fragile truce, any misstep by the campaigns prefiguring disaster.

Into these simmering tensions, Republican research militia lobbed a grenade. Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the rambunctious pastor of Obama’s Illinois church, had been captured on video shortly after the 9/11 attacks exhorting ‘God damn America! God damn America!’ from his pulpit. The video was replayed on all major news services for two weeks. It galvanised a section of the populace who had misgivings about Obama’s sudden rise. His polling stagnated as Democrats wrung their hands over his electability.

Weeks elapsed while Obama painstakingly rebuilt his bridges. Then a few days out from the Pennsylvania primary, he spoke at a closed-door fundraiser in San Francisco. (It is important here to recognise that SF in the imagination of middle America is essentially a liberal pariah republic.) What he said became a scandal—dubbed ‘bittergate’. The key passage is worth quoting in full:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

*

In mid 2001 Don Watson wrote a Quarterly Essay on Australia’s relationship with the United States, which took as its ruminative basis the Rabbit novels of John Updike and thus was called ‘Rabbit Syndrome’. It invited a debate that, in 2001, was worth having—one that Australia does have, intermittently, when our warmth to the nation that aided us in the Second World War verges on servitude.

Unfortunately, the timing wasn’t great. On 12 September, like the rest of the Western world, we were all Americans. By 14 September, our government had invoked the ANZUS treaty—the bedrock of the ‘special relationship’, guaranteeing that all member nations would act in the event that one of them was attacked. (Where for ‘all member nations’ read ‘the United States’ and for ‘one of them’ read ‘Australia’—at least, that has been the prevailing wisdom for more than fifty years. Our eager reporting for duty stupefied the State Department.) In short, we’d all seen what happened in New York City and we were moved to extend our sympathy, our shock and real grief, and make an offer to help. In this heavy atmosphere, a wry, literary argument about the effect on the Australian mind of our close relationship to the States was unlikely to ignite.

Watson moved away from the topic, to take up cudgels as a language pedant for a couple of books. A few years later, ‘Rabbit Syndrome’ is still a powerful short analysis of this national pathology. Somewhere near the beginning, he wrote:

The writer is no expert on American habits or history. He has made only brief visits to America and has never lived there. His knowledge of foreign policy is rudimentary. But for the apparent presumption of his writing this essay he begs to be excused. Like all other Australians he has lived with the Americans all his life. It sounded like a subversive apology, but in American Journeys , Watson reveals it was also a personal regret. Journeys is a pilgrimage through many of the United States, conducted with keen eyes and a steady march, brandishing Tocqueville’s Democracy in America in place of scripture. And what is an American pilgrimage if not a road trip? The map on the inside cover traces Watson’s restless path by rail and road—such a studious sprawl of lines that political analysts might call it a fifty-state strategy, but for a few gaps in New England and the southern coast. Watson is no Sal Paradise, and neither is this a frat-boy road trip, careening from coast to coast with carloads of company. It’s the solitary, even lonely adventure of a middle-aged man, leaning with grandfatherly attention into dining-car conversations, banging the wheel of the hire car and berating conservative shock jocks as the Midwest slips by, cultivating a romance with the automated voice recording (‘Julie’) on Amtrak’s customer service line, racing though the heartland to get—not to Frisco or Hollywood or the Big Apple—but to Yellowstone National Park.

A pilgrimage and a road trip: it’s also a vox pop pastiche of America, conducted with the casual rigour of an expert. Watson learns from a fellow Amtrak customer that Dale Earnhardt Sr was the greatest Nascar driver ever—‘Mean. But gentle.’ An innkeeper upbraids him for an offhand reference to life evolving from the sea: ‘I came out of my mother and father. And they came from Adam and Eve.’ He exchanges alms for a Katrina survivor’s awful account of the flooding of his hostel, whose elderly residents were given sleeping pills as the hurricane approached: ‘Seven people drowned. Old people. They took the young and left the old to die.’ A Mormon pulls out of the highway snarls of Utah to offer Watson help after he merely missed an exit; a New Mexico café owner, the wife of a professional rodeo rider, opens up to him about how hard it is to make ends meet. Between these scattered conversations and eavesdroppings, and Watson’s voracious consumption of the local media, a picture of America emerges. Not the powerful or poseur America of our news, nor exactly the gritty, fast-talking, explosive America of our entertainment. This is something like Middle America, or the heartland as they call it—agitated by the great cultural issues, intensely where they intersect with religious beliefs (evolution, inequality, abortion, war, charity in the absence of government intervention), whipped up by religious leaders and conservative commentators, cast about by the economic downturn and the precipice of their debt, steely with the determination to improve themselves and find grace or success, leery of liberals but disenchanted by Bush, fierce in their philosophy and down-home in their manners. There is plenty of casual racism, usually couched in politically viable misgivings about free trade and the loss of job opportunities to migrants.

It sounds like the people Barack Obama was not surprised to find bitter. Exactly those who we might have expected to be bitter, having contributed the most sons and daughters to an essentially unjustified war, having stayed poor as tax cuts rolled in for the rich, having lost jobs in industries that (as both Obama and Republican nominee John McCain remarked during the primaries) ‘aren’t ever coming back’. Whose disaffection has been channelled into hot-button issues by clarion right-wing personalities, and away from real opportunities to improve their lot. From this distance, all the way across the Pacific, the oddity of ‘bittergate’ was not in its being said, but in mainstream media taking exception to it.

Watson’s heartland was not quite the subject of Obama’s misstep though. Broadly, the most vivid tract of America in Journeys spans the old South up to the heights of the Louisiana Purchase: New Orleans to Yellowstone. This disparate expanse voted marginally for Obama in the primaries. Parts of it are considered more favourable to Obama in the general election than for any Democratic candidate since JFK, although clearly most of it is safe Republican terrain. In the South, Obama eventually won over a wary black vote (they had vested political hopes in black leaders before, and seen tragedy), and more surprisingly the overwhelmingly white vote on the fringe of the Rockies. The target of Obama’s remarks was the northern rim of bluegrass Appalachia, further to the east, a mountain region of mixed but majority-white constitution, compassing parts of Pennsylvania (which Obama lost to Clinton by 10 points), Ohio (also by 10), Kentucky (by 35), West Virginia (41) and Tennessee (13). It tails into regions of North Carolina, Alabama and Georgia in the South, which Obama won, but these mountainous reaches are tiny fractions of the population of those states. Unless there’s a rout these are all relatively safe for McCain in November. The Appalachian campaign battalions will converge on Pennsylvania and Ohio.

Probably due to Amtrak’s logistical preference for skirting high-country, it’s a region Watson doesn’t really get to visit. One way to characterise the mindset of this area, not quite north and not quite south and not yet midwest, comes via the polling analysis website <fivethirtyeight.com>. The US Census asks for an ethnic classification from all respondents, with tickboxes for all the most common nationalities. Seven per cent ignore these boxes and write in ‘American’. <fivethirtyeight.com> mapped out the geographic concentration of these Americans (you might call them rednecks). That darkest swathe is Appalachia.

If another name were needed, you could say it’s Rush Country. Perhaps that’s unfair: Rush Limbaugh has a national audience for his radio show, the highest-rating radio show in the United States over the course of twenty years. It’s not reasonable to say he’s ignorant—he is canny and alert to the sensitivities of his audience—but his moral demagoguery has the whiff of ignorance, and it sure sounds like redneck radio. ‘It is difficult’, says Watson, ‘for a halfway reasonable person to drive in a straight line while listening to Rush Limbaugh.’ Yet again and again Watson returns to it; and if not to Limbaugh, then Fox Network’s Sean Hannity, who is something like Rush without the charisma, or the radio preachers like Hank Hanegraaff, the Bible Answer Man. It animates him, this ‘great contest for America’s soul’, carried out over the ubiquitous but surely waning medium of radio. It makes his stomach churn and endangers other motorists, and though these nemeses are entertaining, you occasionally wonder whether Watson’s passion is well spent. There are liberal initiatives, such as newfound Air America and the venerable NPR, that seek to redress the balance. There’s television, where if not exactly unbiased, opinions are arguably less uniformly preposterous (Hannity, on Fox television, is paired with a ‘liberal’ by the name of Colmes, if only to pay lip service to Fox’s ‘fair and balanced’ motto). And then there’s the internet, inhabited by conservative luminaries such as Matt Drudge—and yes, Rush Limbaugh has a presence—but indisputably the neighborhood of a Democratic guard: Markos Moulitsas, Arianna Huffington, Josh Marshall, Ambinder, Atrios, even Colbert and Stewart, and on and on. Fundraising numbers in the primary season revealed the partisan disproportionality of the internet readership. The contest for America’s soul is well over two centuries old, and conducted on many planes, employing many strategies. Still, Limbaugh is especially difficult to ignore. When net lingo is commonplace we’ll call him a ‘griefer’, one who delights in agitating the enemy, or really anyone who doesn’t agree with him, or anyone at all. In February, recognising that the primaries had delivered an early Republican decision and an unexpectedly torrid Democratic contest, in a year of many positive auguries for the Democrats come November, he launched something called Operation Chaos. In the remaining open primaries (where a registered voter can choose to cast a vote for either party’s nomination), he told his audience not to simply rubber-stamp McCain; instead, cast a vote for Hillary. This after ten years of spitting vitriol in her direction. The point, he explained, was to keep the Democratic contest alive, to give Obama and Clinton as much opportunity to destroy each other’s reputations, without the GOP having to lift a finger.

It’s arguable how much impact the operation had. There aren’t many open primaries on the calendar, but two of them are Texas and Indiana. In both cases, Clinton won the popular vote by just a few per cent—a margin perhaps small enough for Limbaugh’s ‘operatives’ to have pushed the result in Clinton’s favour. But exit polls were ambiguous on the subject. And in both Pennsylvania and Ohio, where Hillary really staked her campaign, closed primaries were held, requiring that voters register as Democrats in order to vote for a Democratic candidate. It was her wins in these states that propelled her campaign into June, when finally ‘the math’ caught up with her.

Ultimately, despite the easy egregiousness with which they goad American liberals and visiting Aussie bleeding hearts, Limbaugh and his fellow commentators are something of a distraction. Like most purveyors of immoderate opinion, they preach to the choir. How the choir came to be is the more interesting question. Why is there such a mainstream audience for discussion at the extreme of public opinion on matters such as immigration, abortion and war? A convincing answer begins with the Goldwater campaign for the presidency in 1964, which failed but, in the governmental expansiveness of LBJ’s Great Society, discovered disaffected Democratic voters in all sorts of unlikely places— like, for instance, the Solid South (‘solid’ because it was resolutely Democratic, and had been since the Confederates were defeated by GOP founder Lincoln). Nixon surfed the wave of this disaffection, in large part the concern of small-town citizens about the increasingly amoral and apparently mutinous youth culture of the late sixties, all the way to the Whitehouse. In 1972 Nixon gathered these voters into the blunt instrument with which he bludgeoned liberal George McGovern in the general election. His staffer, Kevin Phillips, labelled them ‘the emerging Republican majority’ in a book of the same name. In the 1980s, their ranks swelled with low-income earners in every state of the union; these latest apostates were dubbed ‘Reagan Democrats’, and though the schism did not prevent Bill Clinton eventually ascending to the presidency, still they were largely responsible for the 1994 ‘Republican Revolution’ that delivered him a hostile Congress for the remainder of his time in office.

It worked, this new ‘conservative movement’, because there were people at ground level galvanising support from these unlikely bases. The Cold War environment led to a conflation of unionism and labour politics with the mortal foe, and there was a substantial drop-off in working-class self-identification from its New Deal heights. The employed but unwealthy voting bloc began to fragment. Conservative whisperers, organisers, leaders, preachers and authors took the old, seductive mythology of America as the ‘land of opportunity’ and used it to sunder the working class. ‘Improve yourself!’ was the edict; the subtext was ‘climb into and up the middle classes’. Few white Americans would answer to the charge of working class now; indeed, the term is hardly ever used in the media or everyday conversation. In this election campaign, every viable candidate has directly, sympathetically, and without a trace of irony addressed his or her message to ‘the struggling middle class’.

The middle class is struggling in large part because it voted for a succession of governments that have failed to deliver it any respite. Reagan and Bush jr were unabashed in their promulgation of ‘trickle-down economics’, which with increasing abandon took the form of tax cuts for the rich. The American workforce has been on the defensive since the oil crises of the seventies, when for many industries importing became cheaper than manufacturing. Little has been done to reform or replace US primary industry. Given the disparity between low-income voting patterns and governmental reciprocation, you might arrive at Watson’s conclusion, that ‘Americans believe things that are not true and vote for their exploiters’.

What is motivating these voters, if not the self-interest on which their democracy is founded? It’s probably the ‘issues’: the hot-button controversies that disproportionately dominate American political discourse. Civil rights and the status of minorities early on, along with the traditional Republican injunction against big government, which by the middle of the century was growing rapidly—although it certainly did not shrink towards the end under Republican tenure. Then there was the need to win a war against the Evil Empire, which had the nukes to bury North America and end the world. Latterly, and most effectively, it has been the ‘moral’ controversies, where that label normally implies the presence of religious dogma in the debate. The list of these controversies includes the Roe v Wade decision on abortion, the teaching of the theory of evolution, responses to Islam (the militant terrorist network that inexplicably ‘hates freedom’), and of course the constant threat of homosexuals getting hitched on the auspices of the state.

In short, a large percentage of the electorate that might be predisposed, in a calculus of self-interest, to vote Democratic seems instead to be voting Republican to quell its insecurities—anxieties the conservative movement does not so much address as amplify with great sympathy, and which the Democratic Party has so far proven powerless to dispel. This is the larger question that Watson begs of his hosts: Why, in the great democracy where the desire of all citizens is to better their condition, are the big topics of the day not globalisation or education or health or wages or poverty, which impinge directly on their prospects of success, but abortion and gay marriage, which for the most part don’t?

It’s an argument in danger of succumbing to the classic anti-American pitfall, which sees US citizens as fundamentally ill-informed and irrational in their approach to politics. Watson cavorts along this precipice, and some of his formulations (such as the ‘exploiters’ quote above) seem offensively simplistic. Still, a couple of pages earlier he explains that informed American voters know more about their democracy than anywhere else in the world. And it’s because, in part, the American political system can handle a debate about these things. Watson’s argument, and mine, and Barack Obama’s, echoes that of Thomas Frank, the author of What’s the Matter with Kansas?, which remained on the New York Times bestseller lists for four months in 2004. Detailing the particular composition of his home state, the middlest state in the union, Frank portrayed the social conservatives pushing these ‘values issues’ as pawns of the traditional economic conservative base, because they fight the battles that have already been lost: Darwin will never be ejected from the classroom, a constitutional amendment prohibiting gay marriage will never pass. They bring the anger that gets a demographically significant segment of the electorate out to vote, but when the election is won, survivalism kicks in and the leaders tread water, getting to the next election and picking up points attacking ‘elite liberals’ for attempting to break the stalemate.

The chess terminology might not be out of place here, because the argument is perhaps excessively black and white. You won’t get as far as you think might in American politics by crediting the people with limited awareness. There clearly are sections of the media that do reduce complex problems to ‘something less challenging than the thoughts of Captain America’ (to quote Watson doing a great injustice to the Marvel character, who in recent decades has been singularly provocative on the subject of patriotism) and there is a unique frenzy-of-the-moment that few in the media can resist—encapsulated by ‘bittergate’, which was sinking Obama one week, forgotten the next. There are notable examples, like Willie Horton in 1988 and the Swift Boat Veterans last time around, where drummed-up scandals may have fatally wounded Presidential candidates who were otherwise viable. But Americans have shown over and over again that they are not locked into their prejudices, that they are willing to reshape their allegiances but not without reluctance, and with what appears—from the bird’s-eye view of millions upon millions of votes—to be serious consideration. I’m about to contend that the 2008 elections for president and seats in Congress will break many of the patterns on which we recent observers of US politics have been inculcated. It’s not just in the absence of Bush and the silence of the neocons, but in the unusual characters of both McCain and Obama, and it goes far deeper than either of them. It’s not all in one direction, however. Again, the reactions to Obama’s remarks in San Francisco are instructive. He was paraphrased everywhere as saying that midwesterners cling to their guns and their religion. The politico-historical argument was inevitably lost. The geographic precision was blurred. The Second Amendment got caught up in it, naturally. But the real ‘problem’ was a black candidate, middle name of Hussein, with an educated manner and a wildly incandescent pastor, speaking at the citadel of coastal radicalism, lampooning the faithful of the heartland. Will the Christian Right turn out for McCain as they did for Bush? It’s hard to say. Without question, however, religion will exercise an influence over this campaign like few before it. In the primaries, Huckabee suggested that the constitution should be brought into line with ‘God’s Standards’, Romney batted back excessive fascination with the sanctity of his undergarments, and Clinton somehow prevaricated on whether Obama was not a Muslim. And they were the orthodox candidates. Then there’s Reverend Wright. McCain, too, has been tarnished by his religious associations, seeking out the endorsement of Pastor Hagee (for whom Hitler ‘hunted’ the Jews in fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy) and accepting the same of Pastor Parsley (‘America was founded with the intention of seeing the false religion of Islam destroyed’). McCain was courting the Christian Right and the faithful congregations of Ohio, both of which he’ll need in November. Under pressure he eventually denounced the pastors. That they were even wooed, that Wright’s preposterous sermons were replayed endlessly on television and radio, that both candidates are down in Florida arguing who is the better friend of Judaism, all speaks to the thorny importance of religion in present-day US politics. The extremes seem to have folded into the middle; faith is now the dangerous frontier of a political system that has prided itself on the separation of church and state. In everything that comes after this point, religion is the wildcard.

*

If there can be a measure of America’s capacity for reinvention and renewal, a reminder of its restlessness, it might be found in this observation by Watson in American Journeys, likely written late in 2005: ‘It’s hard to imagine anyone now promising what Robert Kennedy promised that year, and just as hard to imagine the crowds who turned out to cheer him all across the country: in the rural South, in the cities, in the ghettoes, even in Kansas.’ Not three years later, Obama’s unexpectedly good showing in Indiana confirmed what had been widely suspected since late February: he would be the Democratic Party nominee for president in 2008. The media embraced it, and everybody knew it, though Hillary waited a month to make it official. The remaining handful of states were dead rubbers. But unlike previous cycles, where dead rubbers had seen reduced turnout and voting that (like the post–Super Tuesday Republican contests) could be easily recognised for rubber-stamping or fringe protestation, the fervour for the season continued. In Portland, Oregon a week later, and a few days before their mail-in primary concluded, Obama drew a crowd of seventy-five thousand people to an outdoor rally. Seventy-five thousand! It’s occasionally seemed easier to land Superbowl tickets than a seat at an Obama stadium gig. Not that anyone’s sitting. And the phenomenon hasn’t been limited just to Obama; Hillary drew massive crowds throughout the contest, and even at her concession speech, thousands were turned away.

Part of the enthusiasm derives from the slate of candidates: the studious former First Lady and a visionary African American, competing for the right to take on the decorated former prisoner of war. Of course there are plenty of citizens caught up in the Hollywood storyline. But greater energy stems from the sense that a series of fault-lines that have increasingly divided the country are being sealed over by this campaign, that the red-state/blue-state divide, which by 2004 seemed like a sectarian cold war, is crumbling in fits and starts. McCain and Obama are tussling over independent voters, taking a different tack to the Karl Rove philosophy of energising the base, and both could lay some claim to post-partisan political outlooks, if the term weren’t mostly meaningless in an active Western democracy. McCain has had to back-pedal from his monicker as a maverick to prove his Republican heart, and he will have to wear the charge of Bush Mk II from Democratic campaigners, though it’s not entirely a fair one. Obama has a surer base, although he too has to mend the rifts of an arduous primary season. He tends towards reconciliation, even to the detriment of his political fortune, as when in January he found himself under pressure in Reno, Nevada, for telling a newspaper’s editorial board that ‘the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time’ and that ‘Reagan changed the trajectory of America … in a way that Bill Clinton did not’. They were reasonable, even illuminating observations, but Hillary, campaigning to a more traditional wisdom, turned them to her advantage.

That doesn’t mean this will be a feel-good election, but America is changing. ‘Change’, it turns out, has become the dominant theme. It’s a remarkable indictment in a string of indictments upon the current administration that all contenders on both sides fought for due recognition as the ‘candidate of change’. As foreigners, we’ve been perplexed by this oddly empty-sounding war-cry—what change, in which direction, towards what? It sounds like ‘anything has got to be better than this’. But there’s no doubt that it has resonated with broad swathes of the populace, and that Obama’s ‘Yes we can’—could it be more quintessentially American? How could you doubt his patriotism?—has the effect of a tribal chant. Vitally, and strangely, this election has the hallmarks of the first post-boomer election, to be fought between two candidates who fall on either side of the generation that has dominated politics for decades. It might be too early to celebrate the end of that hegemony: already the likely candidates for 2012 were born in the immediate postwar years, and even this election, since boomers have no candidate in the race, their votes will be prized by both candidates. But there are other dynamics. For the first time in a long time, young voters are an active, not a passive, force. States that have been forsaken to the other side since 1992 are back in play. Obama and McCain, as figureheads, seem in their disjuncture from the candidates preceding them to presage a new political era. But if they do, the origins of this new era predate their nominations by at least a half-decade. For McCain, it comes out of the steady leak of seats in Congress, which turned to a landslide in 2006. He owes some of his political fortune to it. The discard of 2000, without greatly extending his résumé, and getting eight years older, became the nominee of 2008 because the Republican electorate looked at their less revolutionary options (Guiliani, Romney, Thompson), and realised they would not survive in the present climate. Obama too, in some ways is the product of Howard Dean’s failed campaign and the changing dynamic that 2006 wrought. His use of the internet, while almost matched by Clinton, has dwarfed McCain’s efforts so far. The formidable Republican war-chest has been rendered paltry overnight. For every stadium speech Obama gives, the real advantage he gains is in the flood of small, renewable donations via the web. This is the lesson Dean learned, perhaps accidentally. America is large enough that if you harness the dreams of ordinary folks, cautiously, they’ll propel you far further than you imagined.

It can be argued that the ‘emerging Republican majority’ is dwindling. Even Kevin Phillips, who named it, did not expect it to hold for much more than thirty years, and it’s long outlasted that. That doesn’t mean Obama’s a safe bet, and the elevation of McCain to the Republican leadership is some indication that they understand the new terrain and are up for a fight. The adventures this primary season of Ron Paul, a libertarian whose policies recall an ancient GOP that upheld the Monroe Doctrine of wilful isolation, of America first, have shown just how far Republican believers are prepared to journey in search of new ideas. The coming months will provide an engrossing contest for New America, after 9/11 dunked the nation back into the twentieth century, and old battles with old battle-plans have rumbled through all the years since. Forget the hanging chads: America’s twenty-first century, and thus to some extent the world’s, awaits November’s decision.