Obama: The hope, the contradiction

There are days that define a country’s history and which signal a sea-change in its national course. 27 April 1994 was such a date for South Africa, when against expectation and history; we turned our back on three-and-a-half centuries of racial division and political exclusion. 1 May 1997, less dramatically, marked a profound shift in British political history, as nearly two decades of unbroken Conservative rule were swept away in a tidal wave of change in favour of Tony Blair’s Labour Party.

Tuesday, November 4 2008, proved to be, at so many levels and in many different ways, a hinge day of change for America. Ironically, it was the rallying cry which the vanquished Republican standard bearer, Senator John McCain used in his frenetic and futile dash across seven states on the last day of the campaign, which accurately summed up the epoch-changing result of the US presidential election: “We never hide from history! We make history!”

As the results rolled in on Tuesday night, and were relayed with a degree of technological wizardry and television mastery which made me gape, America made history, but, from the Republican perspective, for all the wrong reasons.

On the back of a surging turnout, buoyed by the worst financial crisis this country (and the world) has seen since the Great Depression, Barack Hussein Obama was elected President with a huge Electoral College sweep of 338 votes to 163 and a slightly narrower, but equally decisive, popular vote haul of 51% of the ballots cast.

The most obvious and commented upon aspect of the remarkable achievement of the 47 year-old first-term Senator is his racial identity. As the New York Times exulted “he swept away the last racial barrier in American politics with ease”. For the candidate, now president-elect, it was a moment to savour. As he told over 200,000 of his supporters gathered on the balmy Fall evening in Grand Park in Chicago, “I was never the likeliest candidate for this office”.

Perhaps it was appropriate that it was the state of Virginia, which swung behind Obama and voted for a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time in 44 years, which assured Obama of his win. In many ways, the state of Virginia, known as the “Old Dominion“ symbolised the struggle for slavery and on its battlefields, the bloodiest conflicts of the Civil War were fought. This was a true moment of American exceptionalism, which seemed, as the ballots piled up and the results were declared, to sweep away the ugly stain of a racially disfigured past and which in the words of one commentator witnessed, “tens of millions of white Christians, voting freely, select as their leader a man of modest origin, the son of a Muslim”. Obama’s improbable, but emphatic, election is certainly at odds with some comfortable and conspiratorial assumptions made about the United States. Steven Kull of the BBC recently reported on an international conference he attended in Malaysia where some of the delegates assumed that the US was controlled by “a cabal of white bankers and Jews who use police and fire hoses to repress blacks”. Obama’s rise will trigger “severe cognitive dissonance” amongst America’s detractors abroad for whom the excesses of the Bush presidency provided easy ammunition.

Cynics argue that it was only a-once-in-a-century economic crisis which got enough white people in America to vote for a black man. But this actually misses the wider point: Obama was a transformational candidate in many, perhaps less obvious, ways. When his quest for the presidency seemed somewhat vain and Senator Hillary Clinton was a prohibitive favourite to win the Democratic nomination, I happened to attend a rally he addressed just over a year ago in the urban parkland of the Boston Common. I thought the crowd was impressive, but the 10000 people he drew that night, was in the course of the long campaign which followed to be eclipsed typically by hundreds of thousands who flocked to hear a candidate whose campaign propelled him into the iconic status, and gave him the pulling power, usually reserved for rock stars. Although his crowds increased, his message never wavered: that night in Boston he never spoke about race, or his suffering, or his people’s struggle for equality. He addressed the future and offered hope for the resolution of the myriad conflicts in America’s national life and international projection. By turning his back on the sort of race-holding politics which has characterised the debate about transformation in South Africa, and which Jesse Jackson has preached unwaveringly in America, Obama got Americans to see beyond skin colour.

American voters in Tuesday did not simply turn a new page for a country whose racial history and current antagonisms are perhaps as severe as, or even exceed, those of South Africa. They also took a huge leap of faith. Half of the voters who cast their ballots told exit pollsters that they did not believe Obama had the experience to be an effective president, as opposed to 6 out of 10 that said that Senator McCain did. But an overwhelming 90% said that the economy was in bad shape and seven out of 10 voters disapproved of the job which President Bush has done. Thus the election of Obama, whose opponent was 72 years-old and a veteran law-maker and prisoner-of-war hero into the bargain, marked the end of a generational era as well. The public clamour for change, spurred by young voters who cast ballots in record numbers and older voters who are fearful as they watch 40% of their retirement savings being obliterated by the Wall Street blow out, proved decisive.

Taking a timeline of the polls, you can trace Obama’s victory and McCain’s defeat back to the third week of September, the day Lehman Brothers collapsed, a harbinger of the financial crisis to come. On that pivotal day, it is now clear, that the election would become, in large measure, a referendum on the economy. Campaigning in Jacksonville, Florida McCain made the fateful, and politically fatal, remark, “the fundamentals of our economy are strong”. Up until then the polls were even and his controversial pick of culture warrior Governor Sarah Palin had enthused the Republican base. But the financial fires of Wall Street which fanned across America and which saw, for example, General Motors announce (just the day before the election) its worst month of sales since the Second World War , sealed the deal. It says much for the discipline, the brilliance and the awesome financial power of the Obama campaign that it could exploit and magnify every misstep of its opponent and minimise the contradictions contained within its own ranks and hidden behind its message of “hope”: a candidate offering change and a new direction, anchored to liberal policies which looked decidedly antique given the enormity of the unchartered territory the American and world economy has now entered.

But America’s embrace of its most liberal president in two generations and the end it heralds to laissez-faire Reaganomics does not change another fundamental. This most adaptive of all nations remains 40% “moderate”, 40% “conservative” and only 20% “liberal” according to the polls. Obama is a shrewd enough politician to know that he will have to govern, as he campaigned, from the centre of the political spectrum.

Obama’s in-tray is overcrowded. He has promised to end an unpopular war in Iraq, and win a necessary one in Afghanistan; he has promised universal health care and to find alternatives to America’s crippling dependence on Middle East oil. He has to do all this against the background of record budget deficits and a looming crisis in America’s Social Security programmes which will soon be bankrupt. He has to divine a manner of satisfying the resurgent big government spenders in his own Party, whose ranks have now increased in both Houses of Congress who wish to spend a trillion-plus dollars to avoid a deep recession. But he has also promised tax cuts to 95% of the population. Former Democratic Party grandee, Mario Cuomo once archly observed, “You campaign in poetry, and you govern in prose”.

However, Obama’s historic victory suggests that he has exceptional and disciplined talents to meet the challenges of extraordinary times and to balance, if not resolve, the contradictions he both epitomises and has already overcome.

*Published in The Star Newspaper, Johannesburg, 10 Nov. 2008

The end of Mbeki and Mbekism: Quo Vadis South Africa?

On Tuesday at 13h00 I boarded a plane in Johannesburg. Two hours later I arrived in Cape Town to discover that one-third of the cabinet had resigned. I thought, somewhat cynically and mischievously, that if I had been on a six hour flight that afternoon, then with a bit of luck the entire government might have left office!
Well, of course, as we know 48 hours later, Tuesday’s gyrations appeared to be a witch’s brew of calculated malice by the presidency, the last kick of the Mbeki loyalists and an incoherence of tactics and an infirmity of strategy by the rest of the cabinet.
Trevor Manuel cited “reasons of decorum” for his on-again, off-again resignation. To many it seemed the uncoordinated posturing of a prima donna. I don’t believe as experienced a politician as Trevor Manuel, who is also the world’s longest-serving Minister of Finance, could not have foreseen the punishment to our currency and the spooking of the markets which his temporary resignation caused. Well, he caused a run on the rand and caused an afternoon of chaos in the markets. Perhaps he has proven his indispensability to government. Or, maybe, it was an expensive but early signal to the “macro-populists” as he once derided the Vavi-Nzimandi axis of the left, not to “mess with Manuel”. On the other hand, as the former municipal boss of Johannesburg, JF Oberholzer, was fond of observing, “West Park Cemetery is filled with indispensable people.”
So the early days of the post-Mbeki era are far from reassuring. Indeed, given the ANC’s pride in collective politics, and its constant mythologizing of the “discipline of the deployed cadres at all levels of government”, senior ANC members and ministers have, of late, been demonstrating the reverse. They bring to mind the adage of “every man and woman for him or herself.”
Personally, I believe the governance of South Africa is better off without the high-flying of Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, the Stalinistic bullying of Essop Pahad, the serial blundering of Alec Erwin and the fanatical anti-Zionism of Ronnie Kasrils. But, of course, the bulk of the cabinet members who remain represent a pretty shallow bench of ministers - many long past their sell-by date and others whose election to high office has always been inexplicable but for reasons of loyalty to the now-vanquished president, and various imperatives of quota-filling.
A few hours ago, Parliament brought down the final curtain on the Mbeki era when we elected his successor. At the height of my cold war with the former president over AIDS in 2001, Thabo Mbeki compared me to a Shakespearean villain, Prospero in The Tempest. As I contemplate the sad end and baleful legacy of his presidency, one is left with the distinct feeling, or emotion, that it would take several Shakespearean tragedies to do justice to the rise and fall of Thabo Mbeki: his presidency and the forces behind its collapse seem to combine the ambitions of Lady Macbeth, the jealously of Othello, the backstabbing of Iago and, ultimately in its last act, the impotent rage of King Lear.
But we should not, I believe, underestimate what the end of Mbeki and what I call “the politics of Mbekism” means for the governing party and the future politics of our country:
• First, Mbeki’s ascent to office owed a great deal to the politics of exile and his pre-eminence as an ANC prince or dauphin: primogeniture was a key asset in his preferment. In contrast, neither Kgalema Motlanthe, nor Jacob Zuma owe their rise in politics to either their parents or to their overseas experience or contacts. Both are grounded in the politics of prison and Motlanthe’s rise was forged in the furnace of an at-times militant, even Stalinist, trade unionism.
• Second, Thabo Mbeki reanimated in South African politics and gave intellectual respectability to a fairly antique nationalism, replete with lashings of race and division. He abandoned the legacy of reconciliation bequeathed by Nelson Mandela and put in its place the paraphernalia of transformation in which was embedded both corruption and cronyism. There is, of course, no guarantee that matters might not spiral downward under his successors. But in his removal from office South Africa has been liberated from the dangerous fallacy of presidential infallibility, and the overweening arrogance of office caused by the over-accumulation of power in one person and in one institution.
• Third, the brutal, but democratic, toppling of the once all-powerful president of the ANC in December, and nine months later, his even more brutal removal from the country’s presidency has unleashed a tidal wave of resentment and uncertainty. In 1990 Britain’s governing Conservative Party defenestrated their all-powerful Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, notwithstanding her economic accomplishments after 11 years at the helm. The backlash from that seismic event remained with the Tories for more than a dozen years, and four leaders later. The fact and manner of her removal divided and demoralized her party and rendered the movement once dubbed “the most successful election winning machine in the western world”, unelectable in three consecutive general elections. The British Tories are hardly comparable to the ANC, but some parallels are relevant: do not underestimate just how consequential this week and last weekend’s event will be for the politics of the ANC and South Africa. The ANC’s once-vaunted unity has shattered, its ideology is incoherent, and the walking wounded in its ranks will unleash their own revenge. We will feel the eddies and backlash flowing from recent events for decades to come.
• Fourthly, if Mbeki had far too much power, his two successors seem to have almost too little. I did not approve of “Mbekism” - racial nationalism, the over-concentration and centralisation of power and the pretensions of the developmental state. But I knew what it was. But what does Zumaism or Montlantheism stand for? They will say that they are the servants of the “collective”. And no doubt they are. But what does this mean? Is it the lowest common denominator between Cyril Ramaphosa and Julius Malema? At a critical time for South Africa and the world, who will provide the national moral and political leadership this country requires and on what foundation will it rest?
• Finally, for the past fourteen years there has been a remarkable continuity in the basic ecology of electorate - at least in terms of its racial stratification and electoral results cleaving along lines of ethnic identity. The toppling of the ANC’s leadership and the abrupt change in the country’s national guard, and the anger evinced by many at this dramatic turn of events suggests that beneath the surface continuum, a tectonic shift will take place among the voters. At the moment it is formless and even party-less. Furthermore the centrifugal force of our politics remains an extreme form of proportional representations which militates against pre-election coalition formations. However, having tasted blood once and having the screen of power from a political Wizard of Oz, ANC cadres and MPs are unlikely to go back to their previous meek and obsequious ways. The media and the judiciary have also flexed their muscles, after a fairly lengthy slumber during much of the Mbeki presidency. That is likely to continue going forward and our democracy will be the better for it.
The end of “Mbekism” suggests the end not just of one presidency and the demise of a once impregnable political leader. It indicates that politics has changed; the arrogant assumptions and certainties of the past have been challenged. South Africa’s current uncertainty could, over time, lead to far less predictable and far more democratic political outcomes, not immediately, but certainly over time.