If any "teachable moment" exists in politics, it should surely be the economic crisis that has overtaken the American presidential campaign. During the second presidential debate on Tuesday, it prompted occasional glimmers of lucidity, such as the moment when Barack Obama, instead of promising Americans that we can somehow drill ourselves enough oil to sustain our gluttonous ways, talked of the urgent need for "each and every American to think about how we can save energy."
Yet at this time of high political drama, the debate—constrained by a one-minute response clock and a schoolmasterly Tom Brokaw—elicited more snores than excitement. When John McCain referred to Obama as "that one," the Republican attack mode surfaced briefly. Obama still looked calm, and McCain still looked irascible as he defended tax cuts for the richest 1 per cent of Americans. (He didn't even stick around to shake hands afterwards.) Pollsters and observers in both parties agreed that Democrats continue to be seen as the party best able to deal with the economy—and that the McCain campaign desperately needs to change the subject.
Given this, and the tone set by McCain and his vituperative running mate Sarah Palin, there is every reason to fear that the final weeks of this election will be dominated by the argument that there is something sinister and un-American about too much education, reason, logic, and—last but not least—precise language. In other words, that there is something alien about Obama.
The day before the debate, Palin went on the attack against Obama for his acquaintanceship with William Ayers, a balding professor of education at the University of Illinois. Ayers was once a member of the Weathermen, a radical and sometimes violent protest group during the Vietnam war. Obama was eight years old when the Weathermen were at the height of his notoriety. Ayers is now known by just about everyone in Chicago who has been involved in educational reform, as Obama has. Yet at a rally in Colorado, Palin described Obama as a man who is "palling around with terrorists who would target their own country." Worse still, a man in the audience yelled "kill him"—and she said nothing in response.
During the past eight years, anti-rationalism of every sort has become the defining strategy of right-wing American politics. Exactly four years ago, near the end of the 2004 campaign, Ron Suskind of the New York Times reported a chilling conversation with a Bush aide who told him that the press belonged to the "reality-based community" of Americans who "believe that solutions emerge from judicious study of discernible reality." But, he added, "that's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality, we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too. We're history's actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
This distinction between history's actors and those who are fit only to study the results not only expresses a general contempt for learning but also denigrates anyone who requires evidence, rather than emotion and faith, to justify public policy. An exchange during the vice-presidential debate last week between Palin and Joseph Biden captures this mindset. Biden had spoken about the Bush administration's deregulation of financial institutions as a major factor in the nation's economic woes. Palin replied, "Say it ain't so, Joe. There you go again, pointing backward. Now doggone it, let's look ahead and tell Americans what we plan to do for them in the future." ("Doggone it" is the limp equivalent of what, in an British pub, would be "God damn it"—just as "zounds" served as a less sacrilegious 16th-century substitute for "God's wounds.")
Biden's response was equally revealing: "The past is prologue." A friend watching the debate with me groaned. Alluding to Shakespeare, or even using the word prologue, leaves a candidate open to the dreaded charge of elitism.
Suspicion of Obama because he talks and writes too well has been a persistent theme in the McCain message (although it also was in Hillary Clinton's primary campaign). Conservatives have painted Obama as a man of "just words," rather than deeds. "Parsing words"—an accusation McCain hurled at Obama twice during the first presidential debate on 26th September, underscores the idea that a fluent command of one's native language is somehow opposed to political action. This would have been news to America's founding fathers, who, true to their Enlightenment convictions, saw no opposition between thought and action, between words and deeds. Indeed, it can be argued that the the melding of 13 quarrelsome colonies into a nation was uniquely dependent on words—those in the Declaration of Independence, in Thomas Paine's Crisis Papers, and in the constitution itself.
Another persistent anti-rational, anti-intellectual force in American politics—right-wing religion—has taken a back seat to the economy in recent weeks. But there is no doubt that the Republicans are trying to revive faith-based issues. The McCain campaign is making frequent use of Senator Sam Brownback, a convert from the Methodist church to Roman Catholicism. Brownback was baptised in a chapel run by Opus Dei, the secretive ultra-right Catholic organisation that started with the support of Franco's fascist dictatorship in Spain. The Kansas senator attempts to woo Catholic voters by reminding them of the Republican ticket's staunch opposition to abortion (and to embryonic stem cell research, which McCain supported until this year). Whether this tactic will work remains to be seen; polls have repeatedly shown that the majority of US Catholics disagree with their church's hierarchy on such issues as abortion, birth control, and stem cell research. But an anti-abortion, anti-embryo research position certainly does appeal to the fundamentalist Protestant base of the Republican party.
Finally, there is the basic, quintessentially irrational American issue of race. It is impossible to tell whether Obama really has the five to eight point lead shown by polls, or whether white voters who say they are willing to vote for an African American end up not doing so—as they have in many previous state-level campaigns.
The common theme in all of the efforts to take voters' minds off the "reality-based world" is an attempt to portray Obama as "not one of us": not someone to be trusted, not an average small-town American (as if the majority of Americans still lived in small towns). The question in the campaign's closing weeks is whether fear of the "other" can distract attention from the real problems that still cry out for rational debate.
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