The President does not do the common touch. Americans love the sort of guy who looks capable of singing a song round the campfire on a deerhunt. Obama cannot deliver that, and it costs him votes. Indeed, if he is re-elected, it will be on the backs of minorities: Latinos — who are rooting 72 per cent for the President against 20 per cent for Romney — and black people, who are even more decisively Democratic, together with relatively sophisticated white voters.
There was a joke after George W. Bush won re-election in 2004: young Democrats put out a map showing in blue the East and West coast states their party won, with the red mass of Republican states labelled ‘the crazy bits in between’. In today’s United States, there are an awful lot of ‘crazy bits in between’ — places whose inhabitants will fight to the death for their right to own assault rifles; who think abortion Satanic; who would happily nuke Iran; and are unashamed to despise uppity black men like their President. Such narrow-mindedness has been reflected in the violence of Republican hatred for the incumbent.
They have thrown every ball of mud they can against Obama, any charge that might stick. Some Florida Republicans have flooded four million mailboxes with a DVD claiming Obama is not merely a Muslim, but the son of a black Communist. Lunatic talk-show host Rush Limbaugh declared: ‘It can now be said without equivocation that this man hates this country. He is trying to dismantle, brick-by-brick, the American dream.’ A huge billboard in Florida shows a genuine photograph of the President supposedly abasing himself as he bows before the Saudi Arabian king when they met in 2009, beside numbers showing the U.S. petrol price at $1.89 a gallon when he took office, and $3.89 today.
Republican congressman Mike Coffman claims: ‘In his heart . . . Obama’s just not an American.’ Mitt Romney merely says: ‘This President doesn’t understand freedom.’ Yet Romney himself, in the last phase of the campaign, has sought to shed his image as standard-bearer of the far Right and prospective bomber of Iran. He had two big, possibly decisive, successes in the three TV presidential debates.
