Putting Mumbai in the modern era

(I precede these comments with the caveat that I'm still not entirely certain as yet of all the details my argument. So don't blame me if this is nonsense...)

It will be a while before anyone is likely to get to the bottom of the causes of this astonishing attack on residents of Mumbai and the world, a three day siege that has led to bloody and wasteful wreckage at several points across the city, and nearly 200 people dead. Prime Minister Singh has implicitly pointed the finger at Pakistan, but the veiled nature of his comments not only relates to the obvious strategic cost of raising tensions directly with the Pakistani government, but also reveals an awareness that the mechanics of radical Islamism on the other side of the Punjabi-Kashmiri border are murky to even those most intimately involved in them.

President Zardari has rightly condemned the attacks and persuasively argued that this is not something he or his allies would conscion. Yet it seems clear that the Pakistani state is far from unitary in its attitude about such matters. The problem for the new president is more about losing control of his own bureaucracy and military in any effort to clamp down on such activities, as it is about lack of capacity to do anything about radical Islamic fundamentalist teachings in his nation. The army of Pakistan is militarily strong enough to wage war on its border regions and wreak destruction in its wake, as Western governments seem well aware given their chidings and hectoring; but it's not clear that the fragile structure of the nation itself could withstand such action - something the West seems less concerned by, but which is a far more important issue.

But, despite this murky background to events, are there ways that we can start to fit these events into broader patterns of terroristic violence that have come to increasing prominence since the 1980s? Is it, for instance, reasonable to agree with the pessimists who argue that this kind of willful contempt for human life is a sign of the decay of social order and the inability of the modern world to contain the forces it has unleashed, a sign of the ending of the era of peace and stability that most in the West have come to enjoy in the second half of the twentieth century?

Well, a tentative yes to the first question, but I think perhaps a no to the second. Terroristic violence, particularly suicide terrorism, of which this brand of radical Islamism forms a part, is undoubtedly novel and distinctive. It differs from the state-centred violence that was typical of conflict for most of the modern era, and yet also the 'normal' kinds of non-political, non-state violence that unfortunately still remain common in our societies - mugging, murder, raping and so on. One of the great mistakes, I believe, that the Bush administration made in the aftermath of 9/11 was to think about Al Qaeda as a military and technical challenge, rather than a political one (in the belief that according explicit political status to Al Qaeda drew attention to its grievances and therefore somehow implicitly gave them additional credence).

But whilst representing a new form of political violence, terrorism of this kind is far less lethal or destructive than the kinds of violence that can be put into motion by the nation-state. Its power lies in its symbolic impact, not in its ability to directly damage the economies or infrastructure of the intended targets. In fact, as far as such movements have had state support at various points (and it appears that some have and some haven't), this has been in large part because they provide an effective way of states to further their interests without directly provoking the ire of a rival and risking the awesome destructive potential of a modern war.

In that sense, even when it aspires to world power, terroristic violence of this type - from the Baader-Meinhof gang to the Tamil Tigers to Al Qaeda to Lakshar-e-Taiba - operates as a politicised form of conflict at the margins of a world in which the nation state structure has solidified to an extent never seen before in history, a world where it is possible to draw a map of the planet's national borders and largely for them to be considered meaningful divisions rather than arbitrary lines on a piece of paper. The kind of Alsace-Lorraine-type disputes between nations typical of the last few hundred years are now surprisingly rare: even the mapping of the Indian-Pakistan border in Kashmir, which stands at the centre of this particular conflict, has attained an uneasy kind of permanence (due to the nuclear arsenals of both sides) that it didn't have in the first fifty years of South Asian independence. In short, terroristic violence exists at this time today precisely because it operates within a world where the nation-state structure has come to cover the globe, and where violence-oriented groups have to find other ways to express their discontent than taking part in nation-to-nation conflict.

In this sense, there is an interesting parallel between this kind of violence and the forms of social banditry that were endemic in certain kinds of modernising societies in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries in Europe, and in the Americas and Asia up to the mid-nineteenth. They are both a politicised expression of group identity that use violence as a means of leverage, where 'outlaws' come to attain a degree of popular support amongst particular groups by combining their extra-legal (and in this case supra-national) activities with a political ideology of protest against the real or perceived injustices perpetrated by the existing authorities.

The biggest difference between the two phenomenon is that bandits were primarily inhabitants of the rural hinterland, the areas geographically distant from state power and therefore capable of supporting endemic protest; whilst this new phenomenon is primarily urban in focus (though rural regions such as Afghanistan and northern Pakistan clearly still provide crucial strategic value), and rely on a distance of political space and social hierarchy rather than geography to keep themselves away from state power. Banditry was a phenomenon that emerged when nations were consolidating control over their own regions. Terrorism comes about when that consolidation has been largely completed and the need instead is to influence stable state structures.

I'm still not entirely sure of all the implications of looking at terrorism in this way, though I think there are many. But for now it should suffice to point out that this view presents such violence not as an example of social disorderliness and the decay of the modern state, but a phenomenon stemming ironically from unparalleled levels of orderliness in our societies. It is a product of lowering the scale of violence from conflicts between powerful national units to groups who operate in the cracks between the nations: cracks that are getting ever smaller over time. Whatever their expectations and aspirations, this makes the political goals of terrorist movements inherently self-defeating. Whilst they may be able to produce meaningful effects through symbolic violence - perhaps breaking the will of one power to exert its dominance over a disputed region or people - they will not manage to collapse the system as a whole. In this sense, terrorists as a phenomenon, if not necessarily as individual groups, are already on the losing side of history.

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A taste of things to come

American readers may be interested to note the announcements in the Labour government's Chancellor's Pre-Budget Report, since they give a strong taste of what's likely to start happening in the New Year in the US (only moreso). In order to try to stimulate the economy, the government has announced it will be reducing sales tax by 2.5% for the next year, bringing forward tax credits for poor and dependent people, and implementing a series of other complex measures designed to encourage people to spend and not to save their earnings in the lead-up to Christmas. Since tax receipts are likely already to be hit by the declining economy, this will be paid for by approximately £120bn of new borrowing, raising our national debt from about 40% of GDP (I believe) to about 57% of GDP.

This seems to have produced a sharp intake of breath all round Whitehall. On the one hand, it has placed the Tories in a very difficult position once again, since they are committed to a far more conservative stimulus policy, which has very little support either amongst the political elite or in the country as a whole, as far as I can tell. On the other hand, though, in order not to end up producing horrendous inflationary effects, the Chancellor has also committed to paying off all this debt, and rapidly, through extensive tax raises (on national insurance and especially the highest earners), introduced from around 2011 onwards (that is, just after the next election, curiously enough!). The government's numbers are all based on the prediction that the recession will be over by the middle of next year, which I think we can all agree is incredibly optimistic. So as well as worrying about the fact that we are adding a debt burden that will not come into balance again until 2015, we're also worried that it might not even be enough ... and that more nasty shocks are lurking around the corner.

In short, attempts to address the scale of this crisis have got everyone spooked, despite the fact that this measure is a fraction of the scale being proposed by the incoming Obama administration. The FTSE jumped up 10 percent yesterday on the news, so traders are happy. But I for one find these erratic movements just as worrying when they occur in one direction as the other for what they say about the hair-trigger attitudes of the financial markets these days.

But it's the long-term indebtedness that's being stacked up that's most worrying part of this announcement. Can stimulus packages encouraging people to spend more in order to boost the economy through consumption really get us out of this crisis as they did in 2001-2? Surely the scale of the global trade imbalance today is precisely a product of this debt-driven consumption culture - and only more fundamental adjustments in the relationship between living standards and national output will bring the global economy into line?

Meanwhile, it seems almost impossible that this crisis will not produce a massive renewal of old-fashioned ideological divisions between the parties, after several decades where the basic consensus between Tory and Labour on all key issues held. Now we're likely to end up with the old pattern of one party Keynes, the other party Hayek. God help us all.

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Shock news on Secretary of Defense

So, the Obama team takes shape, and some commentators seem to think it surprising that the cabinet involves centrists who had links with the Clinton era, that he's not a radical, and that he might not just pick individuals who reflect his own voting record. Sorry - are we supposed to be surprised? What were you expecting? Bill Ayers in the Pentagon?

Unfortunately, the truth makes for good policy but poor news. Tim Geithner, Hillary Clinton, John Podesta, possibly Larry Summers, Rahm Emanuel, all seem to suggest that Obama is looking to assemble a team of people who are (a) loyal to the party to which he belongs; (b) experienced; and (c) capable. In short: sensible appointments. Power doesn't reside solely in the president; Obama has to manage his relationships with other forces. That was the great mistake of the early Clinton era: believing that the President alone can change Washington's culture by force of will. Making and working with allies is the only sensible method to pursue to get things done. Let's hope, as many people seem to suspect, this means we'll see a return to old fashioned American pragmatism in the White House.

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Hillary at State

The Politico today wonders how Obama could be considering appointing Hillary to the State Department. 'She comes with too much baggage', seems to be their general presupposition; and they conclude that the reason can only be Obama's "icy tolerance for risk", his tendency to "go big" and preference for "dramatic moves." This, they argue, combined with the sudden enthusiasm for quoting Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals, has encouraged him to take a punt on a former enemy.

There's another view, which I think is more plausible than this and is perhaps a little more sceptical about the Obama worship industry. That is: Obama is actually a consummate risk-avoider. Whilst you could argue that defying the President in the decision to go to Iraq was a risky choice, in fact it was a deeply conservative reaction to an extremely radical policy strategy from the Republican right. The fact that the rest of the Senate was so supine has obscured the essentially conservative nature of the decision. Obama's decision to go out on a limb on this was fuelled by his belief that change comes slowly and cautiously, not rapidly through invasions and shock and awe. Similarly, the "risky" decisions in Obama's campaign were: to stick to the same message from day one, not to respond to McCain's decision to call off the campaign, cautiously to support the bailout, and not to react blindly to the decision to select Palin as VP nominee: all good decisions, in my view, but at root all conservative ones as well.

The real appeal of Obama, it seems to me, is that he understands things are complicated, that there aren't easy solutions, and that big, eye-catching gestures get pundits excited but leave heavy hangovers. He will have to face the power of the Clintons either way. To use a phrase Lyndon Johnson would have liked, he either can have Hillary in the tent pissing out, or outside pissing in. By including her in the cabinet he runs the risk of giving her a position to destroy his chances of a second term, but she was grudgingly disciplined enough during the campaign (following her loss in the primaries) to show that she recognises she would have to play in a team. If she joined the cabinet and then brought things to a standstill, her political career would suffer as much as Obama for a failure in the next four years. By contrast, if she's just a force in the Democratic party without office or responsibility, she can attack the administration with impunity, and without the allegations sticking to her.

I still don't know whether including Hillary is the best decision. Even Hillary doesn't seem to know. But Obama seems to be thinking that it's a less risky strategy to pull her in than it would be to have her as a loose cannon. One might compare the way that conservative critiques of Bush 43's policies were neutered by having Colin Powell in the cabinet; with the way that FDR's exclusion of Al Smith (the Hillary of his day) ultimately pushed him into open hostility to the New Deal by 1936.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of it, Obama is erring on the side of caution, not danger. And, frankly, that's much more reassuring than the Politico's idea that his sense of living in historic times is encouraging him to take risks. That's what got us all into this mess in the first place.

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The pot calling the kettle...

The extreme nationalist and xenophobic British National Party has been complaining to the press about the harassment of its approximately 10,000 strong membership following the leak and publication on the internet of an internal document listing members' names and addresses. (For unsurprising reasons, BNP members have tended to be less keen generally to point out their allegiance publicly than Labour or Conservative supporters.)

Suffering harassment because of their political beliefs? Oh, the irony. Apparently, the BNP's head, Nick Griffin, is planning to use the European Human Rights Act to try to preserve the privacy of its poor members, unable to go about their narrowly repressive activities in peace and freedom. The Human Rights Act, of course, being a piece of horrible 'European' legislation that the BNP in the past has criticised as a central sign of the creeping destruction of British sovereignty by a vast, European supranational state.

It's hard to shed a tear for these obnoxious individuals, or not to take some quiet satisfaction in their need to rely upon the protection of the liberal principles they so strongly criticise. But the event does pose a difficult question for liberals trying to balance commitments to freedom with the interconnectedness typical to the modern nation state. Everyone has a right to privacy and to free speech, as long as they don't explicitly advocate violence or racial hatred (something the BNP is good at very carefully skirting along the lines of), we are told. But would you want your kid at school to be taught by a BNP activist who happens also to be the class history teacher? Answers on a postcard, please...

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Putting people in their place

George Soros provides a neat summation of his idea of reflexivity in the latest New York Review of Books, both thought-provoking and terrifying: "When I predicted earlier this year that we were facing the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, I did not anticipate that conditions would deteriorate so badly," he says.

When the immediate 'panic stations' actions needed to keep the financial system alive have passed, we will need to address the deeper questions of how we got here and how the system needs to be reformed to get out of it and to make sure it doesn't happen again. This is beginning, slowly, to happen now. I suspect Soros' argument - that the market can produce distorting feedback loops, and that by extension extremely rich and self-interested people are not always to be trusted with our money - is sufficiently commonsensical (and, one has to say, not that original) that it will have to be taken into account. Above all, we need to remember the core function of the international financial markets: to provide an efficient mechanism for the distribution of capital. All else - providing jobs for lots of rich people, creating exciting financial products - is extraneous and unnecessary. The point when these secondary functions come to eclipse its primary function, when the interests of the parts of the system - the market makers, the financiers, the CEOs - come to dominate the interests of the owners of the system - the world - is the point when we get into trouble.

We've got so far from this basic functionality in our financial systems that people began to think of financiers as world leaders, manufacturers of value, gurus and heroes. They're bankers and form stampers, that's all.

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G20 going nowhere

It's hard not to be cynical about the G20 photocall currently taking place in Washington. Gathered together (around a lame duck president who wouldn't have had the capacity to lead meaningful reforms even if he wasn't already out the door) are an array of smug, smiling politicians largely unprepared to negotiate tough reforms, many of them as yet unwilling to face up to the scale of the damage already done to the world economy or to get over the blame game. Talk of Bretton Woods II is mere pipe dreams when no substantial preparations have been made in advance and there is no clear agenda for discussion.

Besides, the G7/8 and G20 have an astonishing record of failing to negotiate meaningful achievements. One only needs to think back to Scotland two years back, when the world's richest countries gathered together over eight course banquets and quick golf trips to pledge to raise their donations to the underdeveloped world to a measly 0.7 percent of GDP; something that none of the pledgers have followed through on.

Of course, meetings themselves have a certain PR value - they give people a sense that determined minds are focused on serious problems and they're being taken care of. But right now we need more than photo opportunities. We need real leadership. The very real danger is that the volatile international currency markets will encourage individual nations to raise new protective tariffs or bail out large sections of domestic industry (in the model proposed for the Big Three auto makers in the US). Not only will this have dangerous economic and political consequences in itself - keeping unprofitable businesses running and not allowing the market to refocus on new, growth industries - but also it will simply encourage other countries to follow suit in a game of trumps. Even the kind of massive public spending programmes that more and more people are beginning to see as the golden pill to solve our ills will be worse than useless if actions are taken by individual countries independently and their net effect is to collapse global trade patterns.

But how can a meaningful global agreement be reached when the interests of different nations are so divergent? Well, that's the sixty four trillion dollar question...

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An alternative acceptance speech

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Analysis of the aftermath: Part II

Obama's victory speech was a masterly piece of political rhetoric, drawing upon many traditions - most notably that of the civil rights movement - in a powerful and emotional way. But it was empty at the same time as it was profound. It reflected the paradox of this unusual election: one that was simultaneously about America's perennial racial question, and yet also a denial of the relevance of that discussion; one that was marked out by the racial origins of the victor and yet resolved because people put their racial preconceptions to one side in deference to larger economic fears; one in which the winning candidate said less and less about race as the election wore on, and yet capped off his victory by giving one of the most significant speeches on race in the long history of the civil rights movement.

Most election campaigns have a certain emptiness to them, since they're built largely on promises rather than achievements. They naturally generate a kind of post-fling hangover. Enchanted by the narrative of the campaigns into dreaming for a while, people wake up and realise the world is the same ambiguous place it was the day beforehand, and perhaps feel a little deceived by their own naive enthusiasm. Arguably, then, what was unusual here was the profundity. This time round, the election itself was a triumph. Without achieving a single policy objective, Obama has made history simply by being who he is and standing where he stands.

But the emptiness remains. The president elect, consummate politician that he is, transformed Martin Luther King's "I may not get there with you" - a cry for racial equality tempered by the prophetic knowledge he could easily be martyred before its realisation - into "this may not happen in one term" - a naked first shot in the election campaign of 2012. But he does not merit that yet. As articulate and eloquent as it was, Obama's vision was notably absent a genuinely novel political language or vision, or singular achievement to point to. The most striking image was the "bending of the historical arc", an ultimately-meaningless attempt to sound Lincolnesque. The sound and echo of the metaphor, that is, was more important to Obama than its ability to enlighten.

This should not be surprising. The election was historic because of what it was, not because of what Obama has done. A Gettysburg address can only follow troubled years of war, sorrow placed on the brow of leadership. Obama has no such experience to build his vision on, yet; and so it's now down to him to make a success of this opportunity. The acceptance speech was the point when Obama's story moved from its already secure place in the history of civil rights movement to its far less secure place in the history of American politics.

Much talk has been made in Democratic circles in the past year or so of critical elections: the hope that this triumph will match 1932 or 1968, elections when an old political order fell apart and was replaced for several generations by a new one, rather than a 1976, when the appearance of change rapidly fell away, to be replaced by a reversion to the same core alignments. But 1932 and 1968 only became critical elections because of the elections in 1936 and 1972. The ability of Roosevelt and Nixon to build powerful new electoral coalitions depended on what they did in their first term of office, not just the demographic assumptions that historians point to when explaining them. True, there's a trend towards the Democrats in the southwest based on new Latino voters. Perhaps Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, perhaps one day even Arizona, will go blue for a generation. But pretty much all these votes can be cancelled out with the shift of a populous Midwestern state back into the Red camp. The swing at a national level was only a few points and can easily be reversed by the fickle hand of history. That's what makes the issues so important: closing Guantanamo, permitting stem cell research, developing renewable energy, regulating the financial industry, promoting growth, education and employment, and so on, and so on.

The unusual profundity of this election, then, comes from the giants on whose shoulders Obama is standing: Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, and the many thousands of others. The emptiness comes from the awesome realisation that it is now Obama's job to make something meaningful of this new chapter in American history. So, President-elect, ponder this paradox of emptiness and profundity. You have achieved something historic in your presence alone. But from now on be humble and ambitious. From now on, your place is determined only by what you choose to do.

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Analysis of the aftermath: Part I

Amongst the many highlights of last night's momentous and inspiring events was Senator McCain's gracious speech in defeat, which went far beyond the normal platitudes required at such times, and once again showed the senator being forced to override the baser instincts of elements of his booing audience. The fault for the defeat was mine and not yours, he told his gathered Arizona supporters.

But the truth is quite the opposite. Much of the mud-flinging of the last twelve hours, already emerging in the previous week or so of campaigning, has been about trying to apportion blame, and much of it has fallen on the candidate, as he seemed to be suggesting. Palinites have so far restrained themselves from coming straight out and blaming McCain, but everyone knows that's what they're thinking; and they're supported by others who think his response to the economic crisis was weak and juddery.

By contrast, moderates, if they do criticise McCain, do so for selecting Palin as his running mate and not going with his political preferences for Tom Ridge or Joe Lieberman. The theory here is that this was an election for the centre, and McCain was mistaken - or misadvised - that this was about the base.

But McCain couldn't have won either way. His Palin pick was clearly a gamble, and it didn't pay off, but it had much to be said for it - a woman, youthful, energetic and dramatically appealing to core Republicans, Palin was someone to build a grassroots campaign around. Picking a Democrat, even a notional one like Lieberman, would have lowered already crumbly levels of party enthusiasm to the point of near death, where there would have been no chance of building any kind of operation - logistical or financial - to compete with the Democrats. However reasonable the calculation, though, Palin immediately became a lightning rod for the anger in the moderate wing of the party against the profligate Bush approach to economic and foreign policy; and the Democrats were able to exploit it to great effect. If anyone's to blame here, then, it's the Republican party.

In short, the divisions between the two sides of the Republican party were too large, and too institutionalised, for McCain to have been able to find any strategy that would have brought enough of them together to produce victory in Ohio and North Carolina and Pennsylvania. The mistake adopted by many politicos in the kind of blame games that follow defeat is to proceed from the assumption that an alternative strategy could have had more success. In this case, Bush, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Katrina were relentless blow after blow to the party's credibility, whilst the economic crash provided the check mate that made McCain's candidacy untenable.

In this sense, McCain's graciousness last night didn't only extend to his fulsome praise for his victorious opponent, but also to his own party, who - divided and angry at each other - do not merit the flattery he directed at them. The failure was theirs, not yours, Mr. McCain.

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President Barack Obama

What a wonderful moment - just to be able to write those three words.

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Let fly to grand emotions

Well, after several weeks of carefully-nursed cynicism and - I must say - a fairly quiet end to the campaign season over the past week, today's the day for getting excited. The BBC reports here are hilarious: there can hardly be a single employee of this august and formal organization who doesn't want Obama to win, and yet the newsreaders are struggling desperately to restrain their excitement, appear in some way balanced in their reporting, and not declare Obama president before the votes are even cast. A moment ago one of them began a long speech over the top of footage of Obama and family voting, declaring that Obama's children must be bewildered to be watching an event such as ... then stopped himself, and qualified a rant that was going to end with the first African American president of the United States with the minor realisation that 250 million people needed to vote first - saying something along the lines of "well, we don't know what they might be bewildered by, yet, but we may be seeing something historic happening here...!"

This has been a fascinating campaign - in terms of strategy, tactics, personalities, policies; in terms of the overwhelming shock of the emerging economic crisis, likely to dominate our political life for a generation; the demographic and structural shifts that are giving new power to Democrats in the Southwest, reopening the Midwest to them after thirty years of hardship, and - who would have believed it? - pushing even Virginia, North Carolina and (in dreaming moments) Georgia to within a hair's breadth of voting for a mixed race president. No doubt historians will have much to peruse in terms of Obama's masterly get out the vote campaign, building upon and learning from the successes of the Bush campaign of 2004, or the emerging crisis in the Republican party, where fragile alliances between conservative and moderate Republicanism have been painfully exposed, or the role of technology, and the internet in particular, in magnifying and scrutinising every campaign utterance, focusing like a laser on events and yet - it has to be said - often failing to see the wood for the trees, moving swiftly on from each minor scandal to the next like a gang of frantic lunatics.

But the historic importance of this election does not begin in 2004, nor on September 11, 2001. This is at root a story of race and electoral politics which began in 1619 when the first recorded African slaves were transported to the English colonies of North America against their will, setting in train a course of events that saw a creole population of African Americans grow to some millions of people, yet remain all the while denied basic human rights and citizenship status. The promise of the American revolution and the bloodshed of the American civil war contain a multitude of stories, but a single narrative thread runs through their centre: the assertion of the equal humanity of all people, a claim so massive so as to ensure that many who made it struggled to reconcile themselves to the depth of its implications, as we are still struggling today. Meanwhile, the dramatic events of the twentieth century - the creation of the National Association of the Advancement of Colored People, the decades-long challenge to lynching, the legal battle that culminated in the Supreme Court's Brown decision overthrowing more than half a century of segregation in 1954, and the thousand personal assertions of humanity and individual dignity that underpinned the civil rights movement's thirty years of campaigning for integration and equal access to state resources - a century of struggle, can be distilled into a single effort to transfer that enlightened assertion of common humanity into a practical, material and meaningful set of equal rights before and - perhaps more importantly - over the state.

This story is not ending today just because a biracial American citizen is in all likelihood going to be declared president. Many predictions will no doubt follow of how this marks the end of racialised voting in the United States ... and these predictions will be wrong. The Johnson voting rights act was followed by a brutal reassertion of racial hostility in the late 1960s, within a few years. But the qualification that will come from dark experience, following any overenthusiastic declarations of 'watershed moments', still cannot deny the astonishing symbolic importance of an Obama victory today. If Barack Obama becomes the 44th president of the United States, this astonishing, perplexing, contradictory and inspiring nation will prove itself - for a moment - once again capable of transcending its own, sometimes besmirched history and, at precious, vital times, exceeding the expectations of the world.

Good luck American voters. You're history in the making!

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Dear American friends

I'll keep this brief in anticipation of a busy day tomorrow, but just a short note to all my American friends out there. Best wishes for tomorrow, whoever you're voting for. Remember that you're voting for all of us!

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Shape of things to come

In the final week of what has sometimes seemed the longest political campaign in history, there's been remarkably little happening of interest to comment about. The lines are all pretty tired now, we can predict what each candidate is going to say before they open their mouths, we know where the exciting battles are going to be. Perhaps the two sides have at long last focused all their attention on the real job of getting down into the precincts and talking to the voters rather than generating talking points that last for a day or two in the national media then fade away into the Google sandbox of modern politics, because certainly there weren't any new October Surprises.

Two events seem worth commenting about, though: for linked reasons. The half hour Obama 'infomercial' was a devastating display of the power of cash - well produced, thoughtful and remarkably engaging for a party political broadcast (you should seem some of the dull stuff produced in the UK over the years). But it was also evidence again of the military precision governing Obama's campaign, cutting perfectly across to the live Florida stump speech 27 minutes in, to see tens of thousands of cheering Americans listening to the same concluding remarks that fit the stories the TV audience had just been told. When we look back on this election, it'll be hard not to remain impressed by the organizational discipline of the Democrats, a product both of the lessons of the 2006 congressional victory as well as Obama's wise, albeit cautious, strategic judgement.

By contrast, the announcement that Rahm Emanuel is being tipped for a major role in the Obama White House, perhaps chief of staff, amounts to one of the first major breaches in security the campaign has seen. The leak itself, in fact, is probably more surprising that the news that the call happened. Republicans have tried to use it to suggest that the idea of a bipartisan Obama administration is foolishness. True enough, but as I argued weeks back, you don't need Rahm Emanuel's appointment for it to be pretty obvious that bipartisanship will be more myth than reality. Besides, Emanuel was always going to be a powerful player; especially given the rumoured role he played in finally forcing Hillary to stand to one side at the end of the primary campaigns and thus avoiding a potentially fatal split in the Democratic base. One should assume that some sort of senior position was promised to him months back.

So the interesting fact is that the story got out, not what it said. A warning shot across the bows, perhaps, to Senator Obama that managing the presidency is a hell of a lot more complex than running an election campaign. Ironically, you're top dog only during the campaign, when everyone is focused on you and every deal (which are inevitably all about future promises) goes through you. As president, you're not the only centre of the universe. People can operate without you; indeed, a lot of the time they have no choice but to, since leverage comes only with opposition. As president you can't make some many promises, you have to give real favours out instead, some of which will no doubt come back to haunt you. And the power of your electoral mandate to enforce straightforward political discipline gradually erodes, starting on day one.

The most successful Democrats of the past century - Wilson, FDR, and LBJ (at least at first) - have all shared an ability to tightly control external groups they need to work with: especially their own party and the congress. At least in domestic policy terms, this more than anything else is the key to successful governance. The way the campaign has been run bodes well for Obama's ability in this area, but perhaps his youth and lack of seniority in the party may point to a more bumpy ride in future. It won't take very long after the election excitement is done with to start finding out. My bet is that things will not turn out to be as smooth as one might be fooled into expecting from the way everything has gone so miraculously to schedule up till now.

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