For the last few weeks, I’ve left the blue-sheathed national edition of the New York Times out in the yard, where it’s tossed over the gate at 3 am each morning, and gone straight to the paper’s website, because news printed nine or ten hours ago is too old to keep up with the fast-moving course of the Democratic nomination battle. As an Obama supporter, I tremble for him as one trembles for the changing fortunes of the hero of an intensely gripping picaresque novel. In Seattle, where I live, one of the most solid liberal-Democrat constituencies in the country, people have been so united in their loathing of the Bush administration and all its works that until now they had pretty much forgotten how to disagree. They have relearned fast. Friendships are strained, dinner parties wrecked, marital beds vacated for the spare room over the Obama v. Clinton question.Age, gender, race and class have featured so prominently in the quarrel that they’ve sometimes seemed to define it as merely demographic warfare, and led the pundits to forecast the primary results by doing the simple arithmetic of counting up whites, blacks, browns, union members, college graduates, under-30s and over-65s. But again and again the pundits have got it wrong, suggesting that the real divisions between the Obamaites and the Clintonites are to be found elsewhere.Clinton’s world is one of absolutes, with no exceptions to the rules; Obama’s is far messier and less amenable to the blunt machinery of government. During the last televised debate in Cleveland, Ohio, he won a big round of applause when he said, “A fundamental difference between us is how change comes about,” meaning that for her it comes about by legislation from the top down, for him by inspiring and organising a shift in popular consciousness from the bottom up. Although their specific promises are so similar as to be often indistinguishable, Clinton always stresses the transformative power of government, while Obama’s speeches are littered with reminders that government has strict limits. That’s why so many Republicans and independents have turned out to vote for him in the Democratic primaries: for a liberal, he speaks in a language that conservatives, to their surprise, instinctively recognise as their own: a language that comes partly straight from the living-room and the street and partly from the twin traditions of empiricism and realism.Henry James famously said that to be an American is a complex fate. Few living Americans have as fully embodied that complexity in their own lives as Obama has done, and none has written about it with such intelligent regard for its difficulties and rewards. Excerpted from Jonathan Raban’s ‘Diary’ in the London Review of Books, March 20
