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Journalism of Courage
It has been a strange experience for me personally. I have been staying in the US watching live TV for all the three Obama-McCain debates and for the Palin-Biden debate. And now I am here on election day. I am again glued to the TV switching from one news channel to another as they “call” the results.
I have been a traditional Republican supporter. My first mood change happened while watching the debates. McCain was simply not very convincing. He certainly did himself a considerable degree of disservice by not keeping his cool. Obama did not have all the answers, but he appeared more thoughtful. On balance, he came across as a more reasonable leader. Unlike many of my friends, I did not react negatively to Palin. I thought that she held her own pretty well. And despite the hyper-aggressiveness of her critics, I was left with the distinct impression that Palin is a leader who we are going to see a great deal more of in the years to come. I think of the impressive women leaders in India: Jayalalithaa, Mamata and Mayawati — who are looked down upon by self-styled fashionable intellectuals, but all of whom in my opinion are quite impressive.
Tonight I am in the company of my well-informed Indian-American friend Kanhai Shah. We discuss endlessly the superb quality of Obama’s campaign management and the luck factor that he has been blessed with. If the financial markets had collapsed eight months ago, Obama might not have won the primaries. If they had waited another three months to fall, he might not have won the presidential election. But that is being churlish. Everybody deserves a bit of luck. Especially one who has demonstrated the extraordinary competence that he has in his campaign management. Obama has put the Republicans on the defensive in their own strongholds. He has out-performed them on collection of funds and has spent the money strategically, forcing McCain and Palin to run hither and thither as they try to defend erstwhile safe territories and try desperately to win new ones. Obama has carried black voters for sure, but not by appealing to their sense of victimhood or by raising the rhetoric. Instead, he has focused on reassuring educated white voters by holding out the promise of literally “transcending” race.
One thing that Kanhai and I are both agreed on is quite stunning. As a matter of fact, ex-ante we are in complete agreement that both McCain and Obama are pretty good candidates. It says something for an electoral system that we are confronted with a situation where the alternatives are each pretty good in their own way. It is also fascinating to note that neither McCain’s advanced age nor Obama’s race is a disqualifier even as they remain important factors. The system in the US certainly appears both formidable and worthy of admiration. We do have concerns though about the gruelling length of the campaign, the extraordinarily high costs, the strange influence of caucuses and the even stranger impact of the winner-take-all system embedded in the federal system where presidential candidates ignore the three most populous states (California, New York and Texas) as the results there are foregone and as inordinate attention is given to Ohio and Indiana. But net-net it seems a pretty good system and certainly better and more long-lasting than any other system of constitutional governance that we have known anywhere in the world.
I am tapping away on my laptop waiting for the TV anchors to tell us that they are sure. Given their mistakes in the last few elections, they are extra cautious this time round. But now here is a flash! Fox Channel, the champion of the Republicans has just announced that Obama has carried the state of Virginia. My fingers halt as my mind begins to wander. How can one forget that Virginia was the state of Robert E. Lee? The capital of the Confederacy, Richmond, is located in Virginia. The great Civil War battlefields of Bull Run, Fredericksburg and Manassas are located in Virginia and who can forget that General Lee surrendered at Appomattox court house in the same state? Virginia was the intellectual centre of the old South, of slavery, segregation and the doctrines of racial divisiveness. And now in the year 2008, one hundred forty-three years after the end of the American civil war, it is this state which is voting for a black candidate, an African-American, to be the next president of the US.
There is an audible shout coming from the TV screen. Obama’s victory is declared by the newsreader. This has to be a truly historic event. We feel small in the face of the sheer magnitude of what we are witnessing. Goose pimples rise even as we think and talk about what would have been unthinkable even a couple of decades ago and certainly impossible before 1965 (when Lyndon Johnson signed the epoch-changing Civil Rights Act). The warm feeling if any is that peaceful non-violent constitutional change is possible. That in fact (not just rhetorically) “the ballot is indeed stronger than the bullet”, as Lincoln once said.
For once I am not applying my usual chauvinistic yardstick: “How will this help India?” Of course it will help India if nothing else because of its symbolic significance. The Dalits, Adivasis and Muslims of India, among others around the world, can take hope that without a violent coup, by peaceful exercise of the franchise, by strictly constitutional means, playing the game by its rules, appealing to ethnic and racial groups beyond one’s own and of course blessed with some luck (or the “puff of heaven” as one of my friend calls it) a person of talent and competence and who is best known for “keeping his cool” can indeed make it. We salute you, Barack Obama. And we salute your country and its system which makes it possible for you to succeed.
The writer is currently in Boston as entrepreneur-in-residence at the Harvard Business School
jerry.rao@expressindia.com
