AMERICANS go to the polls today to elect a new President after two consecutive terms under George W Bush in one of the most widely anticipated elections in recent US history.
It would have been a seminal turning point for the United States even without the phenomenon of Barack Obama. George W Bush hands over a very different America in 2008 to the one he took charge of in 2000.
Eight years ago, the United States was still very much seen as a world leader with considerable moral clout across the globe. It had ‘won’ the Cold War, and few had any doubts as to the supremacy of its model of liberal democracy. America remained a beacon of democracy. It was also a beacon of economic growth, its low regulation market-driven model exported across the developing world in the suitcases of the IMF.
Eight years on, the Statue of Liberty has to many been replaced as the symbol of America by the sickening images of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, while the American economic model is seen as exporting chaos and debt rather than prosperity.
It’s not entirely President Bush’s fault. The attacks of 9/11 could just as well have taken place under his Democratic predecessor’s watch, while the mantra of unfettered market liberalism was shared across the political spectrum in the United States and in indeed across much of the developed world. Even the war against Iraq, which was very much initiated by his hawkish administration, enjoyed bipartisan support, as the fallout of 9/11 still reverberated in Americans’ minds.
But the fact is that his legacy is an unmitigated disaster, a disastrous combination of the zealous ideological drive of those around him – both in foreign and economic spheres – and the bumbling incompetence of the man himself. His unpopularity is now so great that he has gone to ground, any reminder of his presence seen as potentially catastrophic for the Republican contender John McCain, who has been forced to position himself as a candidate of change.
Indeed, even if McCain were to win, he would inevitably preside over a very different America in a very different way. But that today seems a remote possibility, his own misjudgements provoked and cast into glaring focus by the charisma, confidence and stature of Barack Obama: a man whose entire demeanour is a promise of change in a country so battered by the recent weeks of economic gloom that the status quo no longer seems the safe option in a deeply conservative society.
With redundancies coming thick and fast, banks calling in the debts, and America’s international standing at rock bottom, it is keeping things as they are that will suddenly seem frightening as Americans go to vote today, radical change that offers the only glimmer of security and hope.
