Obama vs McCain

Like many non Americans watching the presidential contest, if I'm honest with myself, the emotional side of me wants Obama to win. The young charismatic black contender winning the election is a more inspiring and exciting result than it's alternative a very old white guy becoming President of the United States. So when I read that McCain is leading in the opinion polls my heart kind of sinks. Now this isn't really rational I admit it, but I still can't quite shake it. Anyway, this is all by way of introducing this opinion piece in the FT which gives some hard and realistic advice to Obama - ditch the poetry and promise to defeat evil:

Tips for Obama: no poetry, promise to defeat evil

By Edward Luce

At the civil forum on faith last week, Barack Obama was asked whether evil existed and, if so, whether we should “ignore it, contain it, negotiate with it or defeat it?”

The Democratic presidential nominee gave a nuanced answer that suggested that evil “should be confronted” but that we should have “some humility” in doing so “because, you know, a lot of evil has been perpetrated based on the claim that we were trying to confront evil”.

John McCain’s answer was: “Defeat it.” Although the Republican nominee followed up with his trademark promise to follow Osama bin Laden “to the gates of hell”, all that anybody will recall is that Mr McCain answered the question in two plain words. And that Mr Obama did not. The same pattern was repeated when they were both asked when human life begins. “At conception,” said Mr McCain. “This, that, the other, and every other Tuesday,” said Mr Obama (OK, that was a paraphrase).

Leaving aside whether these are remotely appropriate questions for campaigning politicians (this is America, remember), most thoughtful people would prefer Mr Obama’s calibrated musings on matters of such complexity. But as Adlai Stevenson, the perennial Democratic presidential candidate, once quipped after being told that thinking people were supporting him: “Yes, but I need to win a majority.” He never did.

At next week’s Democratic convention in Denver, which promises to be the grandest convention since John F. Kennedy pipped Mr Stevenson to the nomination in 1960, Mr Obama will have his biggest opportunity so far to silence those who doubt his ability to speak in simple declarative sentences to ordinary voters. It is an opportunity he must not flunk.

Mindful of what happened to the Hamlet-esque candidacies of Al Gore and John Kerry, even some of Mr Obama’s strongest supporters are beginning to doubt whether he can. Take this, not untypical, offering from Margery Eagan, a self-confessed “Obama cheerleader”, in Friday’s Boston Herald: “I wish he’d save nuance and sanctimony for senior seminars; give America some straight answers; crack some jokes at his own high-horse expense; convince me he’s up to this . . . That’s what McCain’s done lately. It’s working.”

The auguries are mixed. By choosing to move his acceptance speech in Denver next Thursday from the convention hall to the Invesco stadium, because the latter can accommodate 75,000 people, Mr Obama has signalled that he plans to deliver one of his Berlin specials. Some Democrats believe that another mellifluous, highly oratorical Obama address to a mass adoring rally is precisely what will turn off the blue-collar voter.

As Bill Galston, a veteran of Democratic campaigns, puts it: “If Obama’s speech scores high on artistry and aesthetics, then we have a problem, Houston.” Better for Mr Obama to swallow his instincts and model himself on George W. Bush, whose constant repetition of simple themes – short on artistry and sometimes even grammar – broke through to the average voter.

“George W. announced his candidacy with a list of four or five promises of what he would do as president,” says Mr Galston. “Eighteen months later he was still repeating the same list in the same words.”

In his struggle to portray himself as empathetic to middle-class Americans’ needs, Mr Obama may be tempted to believe that Mr McCain has already done some of his work for him. By failing to recall, in an interview on Thursday, how many houses he owned and then asking his staff to check on it, Mr McCain presented his opponent with something of a windfall. The correct answer was “none” because all eight of the McCain properties are in the name of his wealthy wife, Cindy.

But such windfalls do not come often. And given most people’s low expectations for his acceptance speech at the Republican convention in Minneapolis the following week, all Mr McCain will need to do is give a clear address having avoided falling over on the way to the podium. Beating low expectations is another Bush speciality. Exceeding high ones, as Mr Obama must do, is a more serious challenge altogether.

Here is a simple outline of what Mr Obama should do. Many people doubt whether he can emulate Bill Clinton’s ability to persuade voters that he can “feel their pain”. Such people are now being told by the McCain campaign that Mr Obama is an “arugula [rocket]-eating, pointy-headed professor type” who lives in a “frickin mansion”.

Mr Obama should therefore do what quiche-eating Ivy-League types are not supposed to do and display some real anger. He should postpone until the presidential inauguration next January any more suggestion that “we are the ones – the ones we have been waiting for” and remind people in simple terms of who he is and then link it with what he intends to do. He must spell out again and again that he was raised by a single mother who relied on food stamps.

He should contrast this with Mr McCain’s privileged background as the son and grandson of admirals and the spouse of a woman worth more than $100m. And he should promise to defeat evil. That always goes down well. Then he should get up the next day and do the same thing all over again. And again. Until we are all saying it in our sleep.

The writer is the FT’s Washington bureau chief "