November 05, 2008	Wednesday	Ziqa'ad 6, 1429

LONDON: Sometimes it felt as if this day would never come. But today the 21 long months of the 2008 presidential campaign, a saga packed with higher drama than any contest in living memory, finally comes down to a straight choice. Today perhaps as many as 140 million Americans stepped inside a polling both, pulled back the curtain and made a quiet, private decision – one that will determine the course of the US, and so the world, for the next four years.

The two candidates have tried to frame that choice in their own terms. For Barack Obama, it has been clear since he first declared his candidacy on a frigid Illinois day in February 2007, the same, perennial pitch challengers have made since the dawn of democratic politics: the future versus the past, change versus more of the same.

Those were the battle lines Obama drew first against Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries and they are the lines he was drawing even in the final lap on Monday. Americans could choose a new path with him or a continuation of the Bush era with John McCain.

McCain’s pitch has never been quite as clear. At first, he suggested that Americans would be choosing between an experienced warrior and an unseasoned novice. But experience became a hard message to sell once he had picked Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska for just 20 months, as his running mate.

So McCain fell back on the traditional Republican binaries: weak v strong abroad, big v small government at home. But those lines have grown blurred, not least because McCain has been the standard bearer of the party that blurred them. It’s not easy to preach the message of small government when a Republican president has just spent $700bn on a partial nationalisation of the US banking system.

But McCain has fuzzed the lines himself, too, with a daily barrage of different messages – cumulatively suggesting the choice was between John McCain, the all-American war hero, and Barack Obama, a strange, unrooted, quasi-celebrity socialist with dodgy friends and dubious loyalties.

In the final push, McCain found a focus at last. As if taking a leaf from the Tory playbook of 1992, he has been hammering his opponents as would-be tax-raisers, warning of a tax bombshell about to land on hard-working Americans. At every stop he has been invoking his human prop, Joe the Plumber, the everyman who, he warns, would pay more tax under Obama.

But the choice before Americans today is not only the choice as the candidates have framed it. It is also made up of elements they don’t always articulate explicitly. For these two men have fundamentally different attitudes to the rest of the world. Obama urges engagement and dialogue, “with our enemies as well as our friends”. He stresses the importance of restoring America’s standing abroad.

McCain does not say so directly, but he casts the rest of the world as an essentially hostile arena, a vast “out there” full of menaces that America has to stare down. Listen to a McCain speech and the only references to the world beyond America’s shores are to dictators and to Obama’s refusal to use the word “victory” when discussing Iraq.

And so McCain inadvertently confirms Obama’s presentation of him as the would-be bringer of a third Bush term. For McCain reveals no difference from the president in his view of the world. In his choice of advisers, in his disdain for diplomacy – always dismissed as glorified appeasement – he makes clear that, when it comes to foreign policy, today’s choice really is between change and more of the same.

Obama says that’s true of economics too, that McCain represents a continuation of the same “on-your-own philosophy” that has prevailed these last eight years. McCain insists that’s unfair, that he has criticised Bush for letting spending get too high. But he does not offer a substantial alternative. On Saturday in Glen Allen, Virginia, Palin promised a “pro-growth plan” – but she never explained what this plan might include.

So, though they could not admit it during these tough times, the Republicans are indeed offering the same Bush formula of low taxes and unfettered free markets – hoping the voters won’t notice that it was those principles that helped drive the US economy into a ditch. On Saturday Palin even repeated the old Reagan bromide that “government is the problem not the solution”. On Tuesday, Americans had to decide whether that’s true – or whether they are desperate for government to roll up its sleeves and help them out.

There are other choices on offer. Obama offers himself, after eight years of Bush’s incompetence, as a man who could run a steady ship. His best evidence is the stunning discipline of his campaign. The McCain campaign, by contrast, nearly went bust last year and has spent these last weeks engaged in recriminations. The choice of Palin suggests the same cavalier approach to appointments that was a hallmark of the Bush White House, notorious for advancing loyalists and cronies, regardless of their qualifications.

Or voters can see the poll’s choice as between America’s demographic future and its past. Obama is the product of a mixed background, like increasing numbers of Americans. The US future is not black or white, but brown – and Obama embodies that. Meanwhile McCain and his Republican party still look, Palin apart, like a country club: old guys in blazers and white faces all around.

Finally, Americans can see in the vote a choice between two different ways of doing politics. For it is, in part, a referendum on a style of electioneering that has dominated ever since Richard Nixon ran for Congress in 1946 suggesting his opponent was not “one of us”. McCain, who once disdained this brand of cultural warfare – in which any Democrat is cast as unpatriotic, elitist and less than a true American – has embraced it in 2008.

Whether it’s his allies stressing Obama’s middle name of Hussein, or Palin praising “pro-American” parts of the country, or McCain himself closing his speeches by declaring “I’m an American” – as if his opponent is not – this year’s Republican effort has been every bit as dirty as those of the past.

If voters reject McCain on Tuesday, they will also be rejecting that McCarthyite brand of politics, embracing instead Obama’s insistence that, at a time when the problems facing America are so big, it makes no sense that its politics are so small.

This is what stands before Americans today. They can decide to see the world in a new light, full of potential partners as well as enemies, or to remain in the Bush crouch of permanent warfare. They can decide it’s time to address the gravest questions, or to retreat into the same cultural spats that have dominated for at least 40 years.

After 21 months of candidates debating and pundits yammering, it’s time for the American people to speak. It’s their choice.—Dawn/Guardian News Service