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Obvious truths – stated and otherwise

Thursday, October 30, 2008

“FIVE!” – THAT'S WHAT,  ACCORDING TO MICHELLE OBAMA’s recent media appearances, her husband’s campaigners will today be using as their short-and-sweet in-house greeting, now that the days dwindle fast toward E-Day.

I’m aware that predominantly the mass media are all about “the news”, meaning information not previously known or well-appreciated. But from today onward, with just 120 hours or less before all of America’s voting stations are opened, it’s no bad thing to simply state the obvious.

 

So here goes. We are engaged in two overseas wars, appallingly costly in both human lives and the nation’s finances. We are facing the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression of the last century. This election offers a sharper, deeper choice than any previous presidential contest for generations. The Republicans have been in charge for eight years, while everything has gotten worse.  The Democratic candidate is offering something different.

 

So it is also obvious … and yet the traditional media are leery of saying this (understandably, given their history of embarrassing premature announcements, from this century’s consignment of swing-states to the wrong column on network TV, stretching back to the ever-humiliating Chicago Tribune headline proclaiming a Thomas Dewey victory in 1948 - held aloft for derision by an undefeated Harry Truman, above) … that Barack Obama is going to win next Tuesday.

 

I'm not reacting to last night's remarkable multi-channel, mulimillion dollar, prime-time half-hour of Obama promotion, well-crafted as it was - though a tad condescending at moments in its pitching style. Expectations of a Democratic victory can now rest on, to borrow a phrase from the US civil law system, the "preponderance of evidence". 

 

The only development likely (or unlikely) to upset this bold prediction of the obvious - bold and uncharacteristic on my part - is a John McCain surge, based in the small town stretches of Ohio and Pennsylvania, which could, just conceivably, help bring him to the magic number of 270 votes in the national Electoral College.

 

Pennsylvania has been now-infamously described - by that ex-"War Room" operative for Bill Clinton and currently omnipresent media bloviator Jimmy Carville - as comprising “Philadelphia, Pittsburgh – and Alabama in between”.

 

Such right-veering Pennsylvanian territory and similar, mainly Republican tracts of Ohio do contain a fair slice of the country’s late deciders. Or, with little doubt, people who tell pollsters they are late deciders. And, with absolute certainty, many people who previously exercised no preferences during this round of the national political process.

 

They form part of the 75 million Americans who are described by that insightful and usually non-judgmental Newsweek essayist Jonathan Alter (under this week’s most provocative headline, a “future-retrospective” WHY McCAIN WON) as “folks” who “mostly hate politics”. 

 

As well as not voting in primaries, “they don't read newsmagazines or newspapers,” Alter correctly emphasizes, “they don't watch any cable news, and don't cast their ballots early. Their allegiance to a candidate is as easily shed as a T shirt”.

 

The major problem they present for the Democrats is  – once again – all too obvious. They might not get past the fact that Obama is black.

 

In Devil’s Advocate-ish and alarmist style, Alter uses his imagined hindsight, but also real and available data, to note that:

 

“Several million moved to Obama through September and October; they'd heard he handled himself well in the debates. Then, in the last week, [they] swung back to the default choice: John McCain. Some had good reasons other than the color of Obama's skin to desert him; many more did not. In October, a study by the Associated Press estimated that Obama's race would cost him 6 percent. The percentage was smaller, but still enough to give the presidency to McCain”.

   

  

 

NO –  I DON’T WANT TO BELIEVE IT WILL WORK OUT that way, either, just like a majority of (mainly urban and well-educated) political commentators. I want to echo wholeheartedly what the doyen of metropolitan pundits Frank Rich wrote in the New York Times way back on day Nine: “White Americans are not remotely the bigots the G.O.P. would have us believe.” 

 

They aren’t – not all of them by any means. But many, I would say, are fearful and resistant to change.

 

And I have to take into account my own experience on the ground. Not so long ago CBS News commissioned me to make a TV documentary about the constantly shape-shifting phenomenon of the Ku Klux Klan in modern America. Where did I find the most fertile ground for the Klan’s neanderthal as well as fearful messaging? Not in Alabama, or anywhere else in the South, but  in Western Pennsylvania and Ohio -- (as you can see here in a dispiriting and distasteful extract, and on my video pages at this site)

 

                         

  

 

The critical question is – again, obviously – how big, and retrogressive, a force will this fearfulness actually represent in the end? Especially in the face of those fundamental issues of economic survival that everyone knows are awaiting the winner on day One.

 

What remains obvious, too, thank heavens, is the instinct for self-preservation among prospective voters, displayed over and over again to journalists in radio and TV, in print and on the web - as when, speaking for many, a Pennsylvanian ex-steelworker, Nick Piroli reflected on Obama for an NY Times reporter:

 

“I’m no racist, but I’m not crazy about him, either … The economy now, it’s terrible. I’ve got to vote for him. I can’t be stupid.”

 

Obvious, really. Isn’t it?

 

  

**A RADIO DISCUSSION OF THIS COLUMN AIRS EVERY WEEK ON CONNECTICUT'S NPR STATION, WHDD (ROBIN HOOD RADIO) - Fridays at 7.35 am, and Saturdays at 4.45 pm.**

 

Listen to THE MEDIA BEAT podcasts by clicking HERE.

 

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