BARACK Obama is a fraud. But he is a very familiar kind of fraud: a politician pretending to be something he's not. He is not the post-partisan, post-ideological seeker of a new politics and leader of a broad social movement to redeem the soul of America.
Rather, he is a brilliantly gifted, traditional, self-seeking politician who has sought for a long time to get to the top. He is also a traditional left-liberal, obsessed, at least in his public life, with race. He has built the momentum of his campaign on the most dubious basis that can exist in a democracy for garnering political support, racial identity.
But if he wins the US election in November, as he well might, he will have a chance to be a good president. The ruthlessness of his politics is the most encouraging suggestion that a desire to be re-elected will keep him near the middle ground. That Obama is such a brilliant politician is evident in the fact that he came from nowhere to win the Democratic nomination. In that he confounded all the smartest judges of American politics, whether liberal or conservative.
He certainly confounded President George W. Bush. Now it is customary in polite circles to regard Bush as a gibbering idiot or the devil incarnate. But Bush twice won the governorship of Texas and the presidency of the US, so he must know something.
On September 5 last year, Bush was visiting Sydney for the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum summit. That night he had dinner with John Howard and a few others at Kirribilli House in Sydney.
The discussion covered Australian politics and Howard's difficulties, but naturally it also turned to the forthcoming US presidential election. Bush thought the Republican primary contest was wide open. When someone made a critical remark about former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who would eventually lose the nomination to John McCain, Bush pushed back forcefully in defence of Romney. Although Bush wasn't endorsing one Republican over another, people had the impression he favoured Romney.
On the Democratic contest, Bush was much more certain. Hillary Clinton would be the nominee. He did not rate Obama's chances.
The Australian diplomatic and intelligence establishment went one step further than Bush. They believed strongly that Clinton would win the Democratic primary and the subsequent election. No serious analyst predicted an Obama-McCain contest or that, going into the Democratic convention, the two candidates would be neck and neck in the polls.
All data points to an enormous Obama win.
The list is overwhelming: most Americans think the country is on the wrong track; Bush is highly unpopular; Iraq is unpopular; only twice since World War II (1948 and 1988) has an incumbent party won a third consecutive term in the presidency; the American economy is hit with financial crises and crippling oil prices; Obama is 47 and charismatic, McCain is 72 and can't lift his arms above shoulder height; and the generic identification of voters heavily favours Democrats over Republicans. Finally, the mainstream media is overwhelmingly pro-Obama and anti-Republican.
If the Democratic candidate doesn't win in these circumstances, it's a miracle. So what's making a miracle possible, especially given, as I believe, that Obama is a brilliant politician?
It seems the American people still harbour doubts about him. The best guide to who Obama is politically comes not from the millions of hagiographic and densely uncritical words penned by adoring media across the world but from Obama's autobiographies and his legislative record as an Illinois state senator.
After he secured his party's nomination, Obama moved sharply to the centre, ditching previous positions such as opposition to free trade deals and the like.
But that left the main ground of difference between him and McCain the question of racial and cultural identity. That, in a sense, has been the subtext of much of Obama's maddeningly vague uplift rhetoric: "Change we can believe in, yes we can, we are the ones we've been waiting for." These soaring lines are content free. But they've allowed an obvious subtext to play out in Obama's campaign. Blacks should vote for him because they're black and whites should vote for him so they can feel good about their nation for having elected a black president.
That more than 90 per cent of black Americans support Obama, and did so throughout the Democratic primaries, is profoundly unhealthy. I am an old-fashioned liberal on race. I don't believe race should matter. If it is wrong, as it surely is, to oppose any candidate on the grounds of race, then logically it must be wrong to support any candidate on grounds of race.
Racial solidarity is one of the most toxic dynamics in any society, certainly in any electoral contest.
The US has been electing and appointing racial minorities to high office for decades. There are black governors and senators, Hispanic governors and senators. The Republican governor of Louisiana is Punjabi and the Republican Governor of California is Austrian.
But in no case before has the toxic politics of identity been so much the heart of a candidate's appeal. Stanley Kurtz of the Ethics and Public Policy Centre has written an important analysis of Obama's record as a state senator in Illinois. Obama has no real record in the national Senate. He is a first-term senator and has often avoided taking a position on key issues by voting "present". But Kurtz shows that in the Illinois Senate, Obama was a predictable left-liberal who injected a high degree of race consciousness into his politics, appealing to people to vote on grounds of racial solidarity, supporting all discriminatory affirmative action and set-aside programs, demanding voting discipline from the black caucus rather than legislators pursuing their individual agendas.
On crime and government spending he took a left-liberal line.
He favoured racial gerrymandering, commenting to a Chicago newspaper: "An incumbent African-American legislator with a 90 per cent district may feel good about his re-election chances, but we as a community would probably be better off if we had two African-American legislators with 60 per cent each."
It is important to emphasise there is nothing inherently wicked in the positions Obama was arguing. They are legitimate positions within the democratic debate. But they are a million miles from the post-racial, post-partisan figure that he wants to project.
Fair enough. No doubt he's changed. But the Obama narrative doesn't say he's changed, it just ignores all his previous positions.
Obama has written two volumes of autobiography. By far the most interesting is the first, Dreams from My Father, published when, at 33, he first ran for statewide office in Illinois. It is very well written and Obama is obviously a capable guy. The memoir works at lots of different levels but is best seen as a campaign document. One of the most notable things about it is how obsessed Obama is with the question of race. He is technically a member of generation X, born just too late to be a baby boomer. Yet his consciousness is quintessentially that of the baby boomer. Obama's background is unusual: African father and white mother. But he had a wonderful childhood, full of opportunity.
His maternal grandparents, who mostly brought him up, doted on him and organised their lives around him. His grandmother was vice-president of a bank, his grandfather a furniture store manager and later an insurance salesman. Obama went to the best high school in Hawaii and the family took holidays in the mainland. Later he went to a good college in California, followed by Columbia University in New York and Harvard in Massachusetts.
We middle-class baby boomers are the most privileged generation in human history. Nothing has been asked of us and everything has been given to us. All we have been required to do is live lives of unparalleled affluence and not go mad. Yet throughout Obama's admittedly beautifully written memoirs, on numerous occasions he claims to be fighting off despair. This tone captures the whining self-pity and utter self-obsession of the archetypal baby boomer.
Obama's gloomy introspection finally finishes on a note of hope, as is essential for any aspiring politician. But the endless flirtation with existential despair is perfectly pitched to appeal to the self-indulgence and baseless vanity of the baby boomer generation.
The autobiography is a striking contrast to Colin Powell's memoir, which begins with the bracing sentence: "I have had a great life, and this is the story so far."
Powell lived through infinitely more racial discrimination than what has touched Obama, but his memoir is full of gratitude to America and to life. Not the gratitude of a cringing minority but simply of a proud and happy man who understands the great opportunities American society offers.
A similar tone infuses McCain's memoir, Faith of My Fathers, the best written of them all. McCain, who was a prisoner of war in North Vietnam for five years and was tortured nearly to death, actually had something to despair over but was sustained by faith.
It is no criticism of Obama that he has not been to war. But his confected existential angst is similar to Hillary Clinton's fictional landing in Bosnia under imaginary sniper fire. It is the device, brilliantly executed by Obama, very clumsily by Hillary, of a politician desperate toself-dramatise.
Oddly, it is the very cynicism and skill of this exercise that suggests to me Obama could yet make an effective president.
