James Forsyth is former political editor of The Spectator.
A telling stat from NBC’s First Read and an illustration that the real author of this Republican rout was not John McCain but George W. Bush: with the exception of Missouri, Obama won every state where Bush’s approval rating was below 35%, and he lost every state where Bush’s approval was above 35%.
Much jollity at the Parliamentarian of the Year Awards today, both Peter Mandelson and George Osborne dealt with their reunion with commendable grace. One suspects that these two prime political operators have more respect for one another than one might think. Also, the good humour with which Osborne dealt with the general ribbing he received showed that he has the temperament and the perspective to ride out this current storm. At the end of lunch, one rather mischievous guest joked to me that there should be an award for the politician whose stock has fallen the most in the last twelve months. I’m sure Coffee Housers will have some ideas on this front. I’m tempted to offer a bunch of bananas to the best suggestion but I fear that may be prejudging things.
One more thing worth noting from the Darling interview,which Pete commented on earlier, is his rather barbed comment about who floated the idea of £15bn worth of tax cuts: Mr Darling insists we will have to wait for the details, but plays down speculation that the tax reductions could be worth £15bn. That was "not out of here", he insists. One wonders whether Darling is hinting that it came out of next door. It seems that the Number Ten Treasury tensions are still going strong.
Boston, Massachusetts One of the striking things about the week since the election is the sheer amount of media Sarah Palin has done. She has sat down with the local press in Alaska, Fox News, NBC and is doing CNN tomorrow. By contrast, McCain is making his first post-election appearance on Leno tonight. Palin has evidently decided that she can’t leave the stage with the impression that she is a “diva” and not able enough for national politics the conventional wisdom. But these media appearances are a distinctly mixed blessing for Palin. While they may give her a chance to defend herself, they also rehash her various missteps on the trail.
Boston, Massachusetts Two of the Democrats’ biggest beasts take to the papers today to urge Obama to make their issue his top priority. In the New York Times Al Gore calls for immediate action on climate change while in the Washington Post Ted Kennedy declares that ‘Health Care Can’t Wait’. This is a taste of the pressure Obama will come under in the next few months; everyone knows that his political capital will never be this high again and that the first two years of his administration offer the best chance of enacting an irreversible political shift. Indeed, there are still political ads running on television—but they come from Democratic interest groups not the campaigns.
Glenrothes was undoubtedly a triumph for Gordon Brown. It has restored his authority in the Labour party and ensured that the media narrative of the Brown comeback will continue. But the new ICM poll for The Sunday Telegraph shows just how much of a climb Brown still has: the Tories are on 43, up one, and Labour on 30. According to Conservative Home’s calculation, this would result in a Tory majority of 80. When you consider that the reality of recession has yet to really hit the electorate you realise just how weak Brown’s position still is despite Thursday’s win and the good headlines he has received in the past few weeks.
What should, perhaps, worry the Republicans most about this year’s election result is that they lost in the fastest growing states in the country and among the fastest growing demographics. Many of the states the Republicans lost this year—I’m thinking in particular of Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado and Nevada—are, on current trends, going to become more and more Democratic over time. Unless the Republican Party finds a way to reverse these trends, they will be reliant on perfect conditions to win at a national level.
Unsurprisingly Barack Obama’s election has kicked off a debate about whether a non-white person could become Prime Minister in Britain. I’m an optimist on the question; I think we have come a long way from Cheltenham in 1992. One thing worth noting is that the non-white population in Britain is only around 10 percent compared to more than twenty percent in America. Also, Britain’s history with race is less fraught than America’s. There wouldn’t be the same level of emotional intensity about the first non-white Prime Minister that there has been about the election of the first non-white President. Trevor Phillips has a point about the dead hand of the party machine. But that is not unique to Britain.
Washington, D.C. In 1968, as Washington burned in the riots that followed Martin Luther King’s assassination, few would have predicted that in 40 years’ time America would elect a black president. But on Tuesday night, a diverse crowd gathered on the same street where the rioting had reached its height in 1968 to celebrate Obama’s election. Earlier in the day, in a heavily African-American neighbourhood in DC, I watched people who had been brought up under segregation cast their ballots for Barack Obama, and I thought back to a voter I met in South Carolina on the eve of the primary there. He was an elderly African-American man, a second world war veteran.
Barack Obama’s first press conference as president-elect was, as with his victory speech, an exercise in expectations management. By laying out so starkly the bad economic news, he clearly hopes that he can avoid people thinking that he’ll be able to turn things round instantly. He did, though, stress that if no stimulus bill is passed before he is inaugurated he will make pushing for one his first priority as president. Obama suggested that it will be some time before he names his key cabinet appointments. There does seem to be no consensus on who he will appoint to Treasury and State even if everyone is pretty sure that Jim Steinberg will be the natioanls security advisor..
Even in defeat Sarah Palin continues to make headlines. In New York the journalistic chatter is about who paid for her shopping sprees and just how little she actually knew about the world. (I find it a stretch, though, to believe she thought Africa was a single country). Palin has become a proxy for the debate over the future of the GOP. Those who want the party to return to the centre, concentrate on re-establishing its reputation for competence and become a national party again see Palin as the problem. (They worry about how well she could do in the Iowa caucus with its very socially conservative electorate and some argue she needs to be disqualified now for the good of the party which explains just how vicious the briefing wars already are.
Labour officials are confidently claiming that the party will hold Glenrothes in the by-election there. This is a safe Labour seat, but the SNP do hold the equivalent seat in the Scottish Parliament. Expect the press to treat this as proof that Brown is back in the game.
It now appears that Rahm Emanuel has accepted the job of White House Chief of Staff in an Obama administration. The Chief of Staff is, in many ways, the second most powerful person in the White House after the president. Some will say that the appointment of the hyper-partisan Emanuel demonstrates that for all the talk of unity, this is going to be an aggressively political White House. But that misses the point: Emanuel is there to scare Democrats who try to over-reach rather than Republicans. What is true is that Emanuel reflects another side of Obama’s political character that is rarely seen in public, the aggressive fighter who knows how to throw an elbow. Washington will be a lonely place for any Democrat who crosses the Obama White House.
Washington is a city with a short memory. Today as I did the rounds before heading to New York and then Boston for a few days holiday, John McCain’s name was barely mentioned as anything other than a footnote. But if Tuesday night marked the beginning of the end of McCain’s career in public service, he deserves a proper and full-throated vote of thanks. First of all, John McCain has served his country in ways that few of us can imagine. No matter how many times it is said or the partisan uses it is put to, there is no doubt that John McCain’s refusal of special treatment in Vietnam marks him out as an American hero. Second, McCain has been, and is, the best kind of Senator; a man who serves his constituents but puts the national interest ahead of the local one.
A little sign of the way in which this election has touched people is the fact that you cannot buy a copy of the Washington Post today for love nor money. There is currently a huge queue outside the Post building downtown as people wait for the arrival of a special commemorative edition of the paper. Meanwhile, the chatter continues about who Obama will appoint to key jobs. At the moment there is the most buzz around Rahm Emanuel as White House Chief of Staff, Larry Summers as Treasury Secretary, Jim Steinberg as National Security Advisor and possibly Colin Powell as education secretary. The Republicans, by contrast, are licking their wounds and taking some solace in the popular vote being closer than most people expected.
Flicking between the news stations just now, I came across a channel showing the episode of the West Wing in which Matt Santos, a Latino candidate, is elected president. But when you think about Obama’s story it is more remarkable than any TV or film script. Indeed, in fiction it would seem implausible. Four and a bit years ago, a black Senate candidate with an usual name addressed the Democratic National Convention. The sheer power of his rhetoric transformed him from an aspiring local politician to a national figure. He spoke to a widespread yearning for unity.
Over the weekend all the talk was about how McCain had to win pretty much every battleground state that was still in play and how that would be nigh-on-impossible. But Obama has pretty much done that tonight. He has won Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, Virginia, Colorado, New Hampshire and Indiana and is looking good in North Carolina. This string of victories shows just how good the Obama campaign and its ground organisation are. Of course, talking about ground games right now seems inadequate to the moment. We have just seen America elect its first black president. A nation that has been tainted since its founding by racism has just elevated the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas to the highest office in the land.
We’ll be live-blogging through the night here. A number worth noting from the exit polls is that 62 percent say the economy is their top issue, that’s very good news for the Obama campaign. Also consider the weights that McCain is running with--76 percent of voters think the country is on the wrong track and George W. Bush’s approval rating is 27 percent.
This election has been a privilege to cover. A country where 90 percent of people think things are on the wrong track could have turned away from politics, lost faith in itself and its system of governance. But instead America has taken its democratic duty more seriously than ever this year. The latest predictions I’m hearing for turnout is 64 percent. This would exceed the 63 percent turnout in the 1960 Kennedy v. Nixon race and be the highest since 1908; this in a year where already a record number of people have donated to the candidates and where more people watched the convention speeches than ever before. Whatever the result tonight—and the exit polls look very good for Obama—this election has been a wonderful example of how democracies can renew themselves.
I’ve just been to a polling place here in DC to watch people cast their ballots. The lines are more manageable now than they were early in the morning when people were queuing for an hour-and-a-half to vote, despite the fact that Obama will win the District with 90 percent plus of the vote. There is something inspiring about watching people vote. One woman said to me, about the lines she faced this morning, that it was one of the most beautiful things she’d ever seen. Not to sound all gooey, but we take for granted that every adult has a right to vote and that power will transfer peacefully. It is all too easy to forget what achievements these are.