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Obama and Cameron are test runs for a new world-Comment-Columnists-Andrew Sullivan-TimesOnline

Andrew Sullivan

Elections are about policies. They are about character. They are about parties and their evolving philosophies. But elections can also be expressive events. They don't just determine prime ministers or presidents; they express culture. They can be a reflection of the public mood, refracted through an individual. They can be a cultural statement about where a society is and where it wants to go. That was true of the emergence of Reagan and Thatcher in the 1970s - both represented a cultural shift from all that dreadful decade conjured up. It was true of Bill Clinton's promise in 1992 and Tony Blair's in 1997 as well: two men who promised to marry the market economy with a new social diversity.

Source: Obama and Cameron are test runs for a new world-Comment-Columnists-Andrew Sullivan-TimesOnline

David Cameron and Barack Obama now occupy strangely parallel places in the political culture of Britain and America. They are both young, dynamic, loquacious and extremely well-packaged politicians. They are creatures of their respective parties, and yet distinguishable from them. Obama has done his time in the precincts of Chicago politics; Cameron has worked his way patiently up the Tory machinery.

But Obama’s reasoned tone and serene religious faith set him apart from the vices of the American left, just as Cameron’s easy-going empathy distances him from the detritus of the “nasty party” on the right.

The appeal of both, however, lies, I think, in the expressive nature of their candidacies for high office. By their very backgrounds they each represent to their respective countries the latest answer to an old question. In America, the oldest and densest issue is race; in Britain, the oldest and once insurmountable issue is class. Obama is the postracial candidate for America; Cameron, in turn, represents a candidacy that is, at root, postclass.

Obama’s postracial appeal leaps out from his polling demographics. His support is not primarily from black voters. African-Americans actually favour Hillary Clinton over the son of a Kenyan immigrant and his Kansas sweetheart. Obama is racially half-black but he is not culturally African-American. His lineage does not come from America’s segregated or enslaved history. Unlike Condi Rice or Clarence Thomas, the inheritance of deeply American racism does not directly mark him.

Yes, as Obama has rightly pointed out, he is black when he is trying to catch a cab on an urban street. Bigots don’t distinguish between a black son of an immigrant and the attenuated progeny of slaves.

But he is also canny enough not to appropriate a past that isn’t his. In the famous speech he gave at the 2004 Democratic convention, he spoke the following words: “In no other country on earth is my story even possible.” But that story is one of immigration and opportunity, not slavery, segregation and survival.

Black Americans are keenly aware of these cultural distinctions. Some have been bold enough to say so. If Obama were Republican, the clamour would be much louder. But most African-Americans will surely not let Obama’s difference from many derail a chance for the first American president of African ancestry.

White Americans, in contrast, are all but falling over each other to elect a black man to the highest office. He is an opportunity for them to prove their lack of racism. After all Obama is, as one of his rivals indelicately put it, “clean and articulate”. He is, in the eyes of some whites, black but not too black.

But whatever the voters’ motives, Obama’s becoming a nominee or even president would be a historic moment of emotionally unpredictable consequence. He declared his candidacy last weekend where Lincoln began his law career, in Springfield, Illinois. His arrival in the White House a century and a half after Lincoln’s victory in the blood-soaked battle against slavery would and should cause all Americans to stop and take stock.

A country long contaminated by the legacy of slavery would take a moment to see how far it has come. Yes, it would be an alloyed victory. Obama the immigrant would not be the great-great-great grandson of American slaves. History is not that neat. But he would represent what the South once feared and despised. And the colour of his skin would change the character of the presidency.

Cameron represents nothing so profound. But he does signify something relatively new. Cameron’s broad-based appeal has a remarkable aspect to it — remarkable, perhaps, because it no longer seems remarkable. Voters do not view Cameron primarily through the lens of class. He isa product of Eton and Oxford; he is also a dope-smoking former member of the Bullingdon club, as we have recently discovered. These affiliations are shot through with class-consciousness. In the relatively recent past they would have rendered a Tory toff with Cameron’s past too politically toxic for primetime.

I confess to a little of this myself looking at that now-infamous photograph of him in his Bullingdon white tie and Spandau Ballet pose. I admit I felt an involuntary spasm of class-loathing. I remember the effortless sense of total privilege that some of the Bullingdon members had at Oxford — and their upper-class chaviness. (The underclass has always had its echo in the overclass, as far as binge drinking and antisocial behaviour goes.) The behaviour repelled me then. It repels me now.

But then the spasm relents and I realise what a waste of energy it is to take these old and not too pretty feelings and plaster them on someone who has obviously outgrown them. We all have pasts; we all have backgrounds. They shape us but they do not determine us. It seems to me that there are plenty of legitimate reasons to criticise Cameron (and plenty of reasons to admire him too) but his past life isn’t one of them. Yes, Etonians have human rights too. Give the man a break.

Some still harbour these resentments, of course. Roy Hattersley had a predictable splutter on Question Time last week. But the splutter dates him, as well as demeans him. Most Brits have gone beyond this kind of thing, just as most Americans are eager to get past race.

As a commenter on a Guardian blog last week opined: “Didn’t this type of class envy go out some time in the 1970s? This really is feeble stuff.”

Yes it is, in many ways. But this “feeble stuff” once defined much of British culture, just as race defined America’s. If a Tory leader with Cameron’s pedigree emerges as a classless symbol of Britain, it will indeed be a cultural moment of sorts.

Maybe a Labour prime minister could get away easily with such a privileged pedigree, just as a black Republican could win over white America more easily than a Kenyan-Kansan Democrat. But Obama and Cameron are trying for something subtler and harder. They are fallibly trying to move past these categories, while representing new and complicated forms of them.

Will either succeed? I don’t know. Race and class have mined the field with booby traps in both countries. Both men may falter; and both have something of the inauthentic about them. But more inauthentic than the rest of us? I doubt it. Life is messy in these complicated times; and getting beyond categories that limit our horizons is never easy.

One gets the sense that in Britain and America voters are seriously looking at a new century and a new paradigm. The candidacies of Obama and Cameron are test runs for a future all of us secretly want.

February 17, 2007 at 10:50 PM in UK | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home