It is Jackson, Not Lincoln, Who is Obama’s True Antecedent

You just knew that they were like broncos at a rodeo, waiting for the gate to open.

Probably even before the polls closed, when the exit polls suggested two-thirds of the voters considered the economy the main issue – and we already knew from previous polling that most of those folks were going to vote for Barack Obama – network executives across the US knew it was over.

Obama would win, and win big. Once the polls closed on the west coast, which the world knew was painted in blue, Obama’s electoral-vote count would surge past the magic threshold of 270. All that was left to do was count down the seconds.

But that hardly made it an anti-climax. What followed, in the hours that carried America into its new era, was something not seen in a long time. Crowds impatient for change in Washington, DC – a city so Democratic, I’m still wondering who the 7% were who voted for John McCain (I managed to find only one of them in the year I lived there) – formed spontaneously outside the White House, and the party began.

I’ll bet the guards on the lawns were a little taken aback. This isn’t the sort of thing we expect. After all, back in the 2000 election, pundits complained that more people tuned in to watch the Survivor ‘reality’ series than watched the debates. US democracy is meant to be something which politely ignores the people, and which they in return leave alone.

My mind went at once to the reports that followed another election, but long before. In 1833, the populist Andrew Jackson invited common folk to his inauguration. Mobs overran the White House. Men in homemade clothes and muddied boots stood on the furniture to get a look at their president. The crowds grew so big that it is said the staff poured punch in tubs and put it on the lawns to draw the revellers outside. Imagine Glastonbury on the lawns of Buckingham Palace, and you get an idea of what it must have seemed like.

Sure, by today’s standards, Andrew Jackson was hardly a progressive. Racist and expansionist – let’s not forget that it was the Jacksonians who gave us the term “manifest destiny” – Jackson’s concept of universal suffrage did not extend to women, let alone blacks or native Americans. Still, his appeal to the working man, and his immense popularity, blew the lid off the American establishment. Gone forever was the Jeffersonian elitism that envisioned a rural nation run by a – let’s call it what it was – landed aristocracy. The mob ruled.

Or at least, so it seemed. In a curious way, the American political system soon enough drifted back into lethargy. In the course of the 20th century, Americans gradually turned their back on politics. They voted ever less frequently, and attended fewer party gatherings. Eventually, many of them stopped paying attention altogether. By the end of the century, politics had settled into a business for consultants and marketing executives. They cobbled together coalitions and poll-tested policies not to excite majorities, but to capture just enough market-share to sell their products.

Mind you, not everyone saw this as a bad thing. Many had been the philosophers in the early 20th century who’d worried that the common man would overwhelm the political system with his poor judgment and illiberal longings. Ortega y Gassett and Walter Lippmann wrote books about it. But the sentiment was perhaps best captured in the dismissive witticisms of the journalist H.L. Mencken, who sneered at the rise of the “booboisie” and remarked that “nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”

Elite theorists thus celebrated a system in which the enlightened few, having to at least watch over their shoulders at the mud-booted crowd, governed in the interest of the many. If only one of Lincoln’s three pillars of democracy – government for the people – still stood, well, at least it was the important one.

Still, it didn’t quite look right. Besides, without calling names, come 2008, you could forgive Americans for doubting that a system run by marketing executives would always ensure only the best and the brightest made it into the Oval Office. A nice guy, G.W., but the sharpest tool in the shed?

Students of revolution will tell you that revolutionary situations cannot be created, only exploited. By the start of this century, the American political system was probably ripe for it. When Howard Dean came along, he unnerved the Democratic establishment – still dominated by the favour-currying, Hollywood-hobnobbing Clintons – by drawing millions of young people over the Internet.

Nevertheless, he was only starting to grasp the medium’s potential. He could get the crowd to the barricade, but didn’t teach them about molotov cocktails. By rallying the establishment, the Clintonians were able to crush the insurgency pretty quickly.

But if they figured another flick of the wrist would send Obama to the showers – and there is every indication they did – the Clintonians apparently had no idea what was about to hit them. Barack Obama, or BO as his cyberspace legions like to call him, was a better speaker than Howard Dean. More importantly, he was a brilliant manager. As David Talbot argued recently in MIT Review, he balanced the creative freedom allowed by the Internet with the need to integrate and channel that energy in a network.

It was not anarchy. Rather, the Obama campaign used the Net to unleash, and then corral, a massive amount of pent-up energy. Its mastery of the information revolution, its use of social-networking tools and viral messages, brought millions of young Americans back into the political fold. We were brutally reminded that Bill Clinton, who just a few years before seemed young and fresh, didn’t use e-mail. And John McCain seemed to be of another age.

Maybe they still don’t know what hit them. Obama professed his determination to keep his armies mobilised, saying he’d need them to push through his agenda.

Going over the heads of Congress, pressuring them through ordinary people, strengthening a popular president: for better or worse, the Jacksonian Revolution may have just found its true heir. Muddy boots may have given way to baggy jeans and open shirts. But the doors to the White House have once again been blown off their hinges.

John Rapley is president of Caribbean Policy Research Institute (CaPRI) an independent think tank affiliated to the University of the West Indies, Jamaica, and is a columnist for the Jamaica Gleaner newspaper.

Posted by John Rapley in Other | November 18, 2008 4:51PM |