Only in America. Matt Frei
of half a million people. Jesse Jackson, the veteran civil rights campaigner who had stood next to Martin Luther King when he was shot forty years earlier in Memphis, was buried in the crowd, his face streaming with tears. He too had tried to make a run for the White House two decades earlier but failed. Jackson had been at times lukewarm, critical and downright obscene about Obama’s candidacy. Like many other leaders from the civil rights generation, Jackson at first thought that Obama, with his white mother and Kenyan father, wasn’t black enough. Obama was not the descendant of slaves. He had not been branded by history. His skin colour, like his candidacy, represented a compromise to purists in the civil rights movement. That compromise only became acceptable as they realized that the candidate had a real chance of becoming President.
The other famous face in the crowd belonged to Oprah Winfrey, the fabulously wealthy entertainer and talk-show hostess who had supported Obama from the start and had organized mass rallies on his behalf. ‘He is the one …’, she once declared, sounding more as if she was touting a Messiah than a candidate for public office. Oprah’s endorsement from the sofa pulpit of her television show dusted Obama with mainstream appeal and introduced him to legions of white housewives who were only dimly aware of the lanky politician with the exotic name. The rest of the vast crowd in Chicago was anonymous: a mixture of white, black, Hispanic, young and old. They were cheering, crying, laughing or just open-mouthed with astonishment. In our studio in Washington, DC I watched Trent Duffy, the young spokesman of the outgoing Bush White House, watch the pictures from Chicago. He too gulped. A McCain supporter, he couldn’t help but feel a moment of pride. Whatever you thought of Obama as a candidate or of his potential as a future President, this was a night to remember. America had reintroduced itself to the rest of the world.
Even the New York Times, which prides itself on its long-winded headlines, was lost for verbosity. One word bleated out from its front page: OBAMA. The New York Post, owned by Rupert Murdoch, who had been lukewarm about the candidacy of Senator Obama, splashed a reverential ‘Mr President’ on its front page. In Kenya, where relations of the President-elect still lived in a village of the Luo tribe, the government declared 4 November a national holiday. Elsewhere Obama’s election was greeted overwhelmingly as a symbol of America’s renewal, as proof that America could still inspire, as evidence that the tired cliché of the American dream was not yet dead. After almost a decade of mounting anti-Americanism, newspapers and politicians in Paris, Rome and London suddenly began to ask themselves: could we ever elect our own Obama? One dreads to think what they would have said if Senator John McCain and Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska had prevailed. It would surely have been: look at how racist America still is. The charge would have been levelled even though no European nation is close to electing a native-born Pakistani, Turk or Algerian as its head of government or state.
The morning after the election the weather was still grey and wet. Yellowed leaves were falling limply to the ground and yet the dogged regiment of Washington commuters seemed to have a spring in its step. Something had changed. I asked the African American woman at the hotel reception how she felt. She smiled, winked and said nothing. She didn’t need to. The capital, which had never failed to vote for a Democratic presidential candidate, had opted for Barack Obama by an unprecedented 92 per cent. Not even Saddam Hussein could rely on such results. African Americans, who make up almost two-thirds of the city’s population and who used to be famously absent at the polling booth on election day, turned out in record numbers. A similar picture was repeated elsewhere. Hispanic voters, who now represent the biggest minority in the United States, voted overwhelmingly for Obama. So did students. The Democrats had managed to mobilize millions of first-time voters in an aggressive and meticulous campaign that used the internet as a tool of fundraising and recruitment. Obama took his campaign to enemy territory and won states like Virginia which had not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since the Lyndon Johnson landslide of 1964. It was an astonishing achievement, one that came about because of an uncanny combination of factors: a ground-breaking campaign, a great candidate, a weak opposition, revulsion with the incumbent Republican President, opposition to his war in Iraq, an economic crisis that had flawed America and undermined its self-confidence, and all of the above leavened with the deep desire for change. A majority of Americans had come to the conclusion that in the twenty-first century it was time to try something different. And so they went out to make some history.
The last time I felt the benign knot in my stomach was the day the Berlin Wall came down. This too was a symbolic moment. It was bloodless and it shifted the world’s political furniture. Of course the laughter and the tears of joy didn’t last for long. German unification was a bruising business. Running America will be, too. With two wars and a failing economy, Obama has his work cut out. As the satirical magazine The Onion put it in a banner headline: ‘Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job’. How he got the job and how it became so bad is the unlikely story of America in the last eight years, a story which we joined after our arrival in the summer of 2002.
November 2008
There are many reasons to feel queasy about starting a new job in a strange country. But fear of dying isn’t usually on the list. I was on my way to Washington DC. We had lived in Asia for almost six years and were preparing to take up a new posting in the United States. Penny, my wife had dispatched me early to find schools for our children George, Amelia and Lottie, a car and a house to live in. After a nomadic decade of moving from one post to the next I had learned that the secret to a happy foreign correspondent is a foreign correspondent’s happy spouse. My track record in scouting out good accommodation had been proven in Rome (a penthouse flat in a crumbling palazzo), Hong Kong (a crumbling flat with a fabulous view) and Singapore (an old British officer’s house with lazy fans and a large garden). Now it was Washington’s turn. The pressure was on. As I settled into my seat on the plane I could imagine us all lounging on one of those traditional American porches.
I hadn’t been back to DC since my first and only visit in 1988 as a young radio reporter. Then I had come to cover the election of President George (HW) Bush. If someone had told me I would be returning a decade and a half later to live in America and report on the presidency of another man called George (W) Bush I would have laughed. To have father and son elected to the same coveted job was odd enough. To have them share exactly the same name – but for one humble H – would have struck me as bizarrely unimaginative. At least they’d save money on the monogrammed napkins at the White House. The thought occurred to me as I surveyed the movie menu and looked forward to a long transpacific flight without young children and the torture that pits their restlessness against your nerves. The journey was going to be blissful.
It was for about six hours. Until we reached a point somewhere over the Pacific. I thought I could see the sunrise over San Francisco, having just witnessed the sunset over Japan. I had already drunk half a bottle of white wine, my sense of timing was clearly impaired and I was stuck into a soppy film that would have seen me walk out of the cinema on terra firma but almost had me in floods of tears at 30,000 feet. Tear ducts are suckers for high altitude and low pressure, apparently. Suddenly the narrative was interrupted and a completely different voice entered my head, mixed with static crackle. It was the captain, an American with a reassuring baritone and a slight Southern drawl. ‘I’m afraid to tell you, ladies and gentlemen’ – pilots, it occurred to me immediately, should never use emotive words like ‘afraid’ – ‘that we have to report an engine failure in engines two and four.’ There was a pause, which I didn’t much care for. I had suddenly lost interest in the film. The tear ducts got a grip on the unfolding situation. They shut down. I was hungry for more information about our plane. I wanted to know a lot about engines two and four, but also, come to think of it, about one and three. The captain cleared his throat. ‘We will be heading, ah, I mean, returning, to the nearest airport, which I am afraid to tell you is … Tokyo. It’s five hours from where we are now, but it’s a little closer than going on to San Francisco and … we may have to make an emergency landing. I will keep you posted, folks.’ You could feel and hear the collective sobering up of three-hundred-plus passengers. Seats that had been almost horizontal were suddenly ramrod-straight. A man and a