No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people, said H.L. Mencken. Joe Klein recently dressed up the same point in Time magazine, arguing that election winnability in the United States depends on “low-information signalling” — how the candidate rolls a ball, downs a beer or wears a flagpin — how convincingly he or she mimics “average American” rituals, no matter how transparent the motives. Barack Obama, by that logic, has gone about it all wrong — audaciously choosing the more complex, less palatable truths, believing that what America needs is to confront itself in a “big” election. At a time when his black pastor Jeremiah Wright’s incendiary “God damn America” sermons were being played on infinite loop on Youtube and cable to discredit him, Obama shunned the obvious solution of dissociating himself from Wright and, instead, gently steered the country around to look beyond the black and white, and examine its own deeply held, irrational race-anxieties. But what a difference a few weeks made. Now, at the lowest point in his campaign so far, Obama has been forced to sever his association with Wright after the trash-talking preacher’s statements on 9/11 being a case of America’s “chickens come home to roost” and HIV-AIDS being a giant conspiracy against blacks. But is Obama’s U-turn a genuine reassessment based on fresh evidence or is it a final falling down to earth, his capitulation to the sorry rules of the political machine, as his detractors gleefully claim? Hillary Clinton has been accused of her own share of dissembling — but then again, no one seems to have expected much better from her so she actually stands to gain in this coarsened fray. Either way, one thing is obvious. This election has gripped the rest of the world, in ways nobody expected. The primaries process was aimed at generating the core issues bottom up, state-by-state, and testing candidates across all kinds of voter expectations. It was supposed to be an example in grassroots referendum. Instead, it has turned in on itself, freakishly grinding on. We have watched with horrid fascination as it beatifies and then tears down Barack Obama, destroys and resurrects Clinton over and over again, seizes upon every gaffe of campaigns under constant surveillance, and distorts every issue of significance through the funhouse mirrors of different media outlets. Obama isn’t the only thing that’s shrunk in this wash.
