The joy ride

What a difference a month in politics makes, as that British leader from another age Harold Wilson once suggested (although a week was enough for him). In the course of the past month we saw the US election turned on its head, A president, enfeebled by old age, dethroned. A deputy installed instantly not just as the heiress, but as the saviour. An opponent who once looked unbeatable struggling to make sense of it all, and reduced to fulminating about why he doesn’t have that old president to kick around any more.

Yet here’s the thing. Some elements of the historic rollercoaster in those disunited States of America are all too familiar as the lazy days of summer in the North now turn to an autumn of a bare-knuckled fight for power. Hope is back big-time as a marketing tool. And who was the original boy from Hope? Why, Bill Clinton, winner of my first US election as a White House correspondent, in 1992, the lad from Hope, Arkansas, remember? Diversity too is back with a megaphone, witness the way the Obamas took the stage recently to remind all that, as Michelle put it so tellingly, the US Presidency can be “one of those Black jobs” Donald Trump keeps talking about. It spoke volumes that Trump, in one of his bizarre rants, tried to say that his rival now, Kamala Harris, was not really black, but Asian, Indian, whatever…

Yet lest we forget. In between Bill and Barack there was one George ‘Dubya’ Bush. And one indelible memory of covering that extraordinary election in the year of the millennium – when Bush won courtesy of the Supreme Court, not because of the vote-count – was the theme-cum-question his team came up with: Who would you rather go on a date with? And who would you rather have a beer with? Facile, maybe, but a genius manoeuvre when you started asking women and men voters whether they would opt for the light-hearted, back-slapping Dubya or his opponent, the very stiff Al Gore.

I’m reminded of that because it seems clear that the Democrats under Kamala Harris are seeking to make this campaign about good vibes, the path to hope, the embrace of all whatever the colour, a feel-good factor that we know sells in this age. “Energy, passion, joy,” said her vice-presidential nominee, Tim Walz, as he spoke at the Democratic Convention, “that’s what she brings.” Should be said Tim – farm boy, High School football coach, devoted Dad – seems very much a fellow many could have a beer with. Except we’re told he doesn’t drink. Ah well, all things to all people, right? ‘Tis a time-honoured tactic. (Remember Bill Clinton told us: “I smoked but I didn’t inhale.”)

What’s at work here, I suspect, is that the key to this election lies with that new breed of voter with an extraordinary title. The “Double-Haters.” These are the voters, up to 20 per cent of the electorate, who had been telling us that they loathed both Trump and Joe Biden when that was the choice. Making their candidate more likeable, more open-minded, listening rather than dictating, that is so clearly critical for the Democrats, alongside the politics of bringing back African-Americans, and Latinos, and Arab-Americans to the party. Should be said as well that strategy could avoid the challenge of producing a clear policy agenda, because the Harris team was in the business of following Biden’s line, until late July, little time to forge policy goals. Also, and critically, the candidate herself has a history of what is, so euphemistically called “Ideological fluidity” – fracking in the energy arena being just one example. What Trump calls “shameless flip-flopping.”

And there’s the rub. Will this be an election of vibes, energy, passion, joy, or can policy fights erupt come debate time, and so have this historic campaign turn yet again? There’s no shortage of issues, and questions about where Harris stands. Does the economy still dictate the outcome, for example, because she’s confined herself to promising tax cuts for the middle class, and an attack on “price gouging” by retailers at the supermarket. Could Trump ride the anti-immigration sentiment back to power, an area where Kamala Harris has floundered after being given the tar-baby issue of the Mexican border by the Biden Administration? Or can the female candidate make reproductive rights a key issue in a period when the Trumpist Supreme Court is clearly threatening to outlaw abortion? 

On the foreign policy front, what is clear is that the Harris team favours a lighter American footprint on our world given the way her chief advisers have written in recent times. Gone may be the days of the United States giving itself a semi-messianic role in shaping the future of others in the name of freedom, democracy and regime change. Telling is the view of Philip Gordon, a veteran hand on the Middle East and Europe under Obama and Biden, now the right-hand adviser to Harris on the world.

Gordon has been disarmingly clear about failed US interventions in the likes of Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq and Syria. “Policymakers underestimated the challenges of ousting a regime, overstated the threats faced by the United States, prematurely declared victory, failed to anticipate the chaos that ensued,” he wrote in a book titled Losing the Long Game, concluding defeat in all but name. “Ultimately they found themselves bearing the costs, in some cases more than a trillion dollars and thousands of American lives, for many years or even decades to come.” Now there’s an area of policy to sharpen the pens of the journalists who have been calling for Harris to sit down and answer questions.

Given the way in which the war for Gaza has hurt the Democrats, with significant numbers protesting the Biden Administration’s handling of Israel and Arab-Americans critical to the chances of victory in key states like Michigan, Kamala Harris has attempted to heal the division with a message carefully calibrated to appease all. “I will always ensure Israel has the right to defend itself,” she told the DNC convention in Chicago, but pointedly changed tone to declare on the Palestinians in a way Biden never has. “So many innocent lives lost. Desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, over and over again. The scale of the suffering is heartbreaking.” She concluded self-determination for the Palestinians is an imperative now. 

All things to all people, right? Sure looks like it. Yet lest we forget, it worked for many of the men before her, and with the man-child Trump on the other side, calling her and Joe Biden a disaster, she can be understood for hoping this can be kept to a stand-off between hope about tomorrow and dismay about yesterday.