They don’t have silly minority parties like the Lib Dems, they don’t have mad communist parties like in France, and they actually talk about the problems instead of personalities, unlike Britain.

What most struck me though, is their campaigning, and I have two main examples of how Spain is miraculously ahead of the game.

Here’s the first example. You are all familiar with this picture of Obama with the slogan “Change.” below:

I then realised that this ground-breaking piece of imagery was nothing but a jumped up PSOE campaign from 1982. Have a glance at Felipe Gonzalez:

The topline reads “Vote PSOE” and the slogan means “For change.” Suspicious, no?

Anyway, this is just an aside compared to what I want to go into. My second example pertains to the infamous Conservative Cameron poster campaign:

Which bears an amazing resemblance to the Spanish Conservative Party’s (el Partido Popular) election posters in 2008, which was also just a picture of their leader with a slogan. Take a look at “Make it to the end of the month” “With Rajoy it’s possible“:

Note that the British Tories decided to drop the blue coloured background.

So, the next interesting development is that in Britain, everybody lauded the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the My David Cameron website for it’s (very good, I shall add) instant poster parody maker of the above poster, and subsequent campaign editions. However, back in their elections in 2008, that’s right, they had their own DIY-Rajoy poster generator!

And they call it New Media!

Regardless, I’ve always been a cynical supporter of Obama. (Once, Twice, Thrice.) I still think America is as polarised and divided as it was 101 days ago, (arbitrary figure) but at least I’m on the side that’s winning at last.

On the flip-side, the Republicans are acting as if the Russians had invaded, I don’t catch Fox news much, for fear of catching something worse, like swine flu, but the clips I see are certainly not isolated examples.

Like some, I was sceptical that Obama would see himself as an American President rather than a world leader, and he would act as an American rather than a statesman (This was around the time of the “Buy American” protectionist debate). However, he’s made plenty of decisions that should have been made a long time ago.

It’s a shame he has to deal with the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, but it’s not a shame that he’s the one to deal with it.

Best of luck to him.

–
In other news, my best friend from school died today. I always remember going to stay with him for a week when I was seven, while my brother was being born. I don’t know if I’ll be able to make it to the funeral due to exams; I’m not sure I’ll even get an invite, since I hadn’t seen him in eight years.

The problem they all face though, is that Obama just isn’t funny. The key to satire is finding an angle, what we in the business call a “take”. Nobody has been able to find a theme they can use to caricature the President-Elect.

Normally, finding a take is easy and takes less than a few weeks. Al Gore’s robotic persona, Bill Clinton’s womanising, Tony Blair’s hand gestures and Cheshire-cat grin, David Cameron’s shallow PR and John Major’s greyness, to name but a few.  If George W. Bush wants a positive aspect to his legacy, he needs only to watch a comedy program, where he will see an eight-year long golden age of satire. It is almost impossible to imagine Barack Obama, for all his oratory skills, being able to rival “Fool me once, shame on… shame on you… fool me can’t get fooled again.”

With John McCain, it was easy; his age, his computer illiteracy and his seven houses. Obama is much harder to pin down, and there is inevitably an air of ‘holding back’, in no small part due to his race. During the campaign, the New Yorker, (a bit like our Spectator, but with a liberal slant) came under fire for a cover illustration featuring Obama and his wife as a die-hard republican may see him; a Muslim flag-burning, fist-bumping terrorist.  David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, wrote, “The cover takes a lot of distortions, lies, and misconceptions about the Obamas and puts a mirror up to them to show them for what they are.”

Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show, tried to confront the issue head on; He made a joke about Obama’s changing attitude to campaign financing, and met with such audience resistance he exclaimed, “You know, you’re allowed to laugh at him!” Obama’s team, particularly Vice-President-Elect Joe Biden, notorious for his gaffes, is where the humour comes from, rather than Obama himself. Despite this, Biden’s candour is nothing compared to the creepy Penguin-from-Batman Dick Cheney, and probably won’t provide pundits with Rumsfeldian phrases like “Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know”.  (See my review on Oliver Stone’s film W. for more comedic opportunities provided by the Bush Administration.)

Nothing seems to stick; perhaps something will emerge after he is sworn in as President on January 20^th, but right now all the cartoonists have to go on is either Superman Obama (as Gerald Scarfe portrays him) or as Messiah Obama (as Peter Brookes does).  Whether or not the world can find an angle on the next president, satire in the post-Bush era will never be the same.

Obamamania will end in disappointment for all. Barack Obama’s media portrayal, persona and reception really are too good to be true, and the result will be hubris on his part and disillusionment on ours.

While there is a feeling of inevitability (a word used advisedly) that Obama is the president-in-waiting, his image is also built around the theme of “Hope”- everything is designed to suggest that he is some sort of Messiah. His logo, a capital letter “O” in the colours of the American flag, with a sort of rainbow at the bottom, giving the roof of the “O” the look of a rising son in the horizon inspire great expectations. Even the image on the cover of his book “The Audacity of Hope” with him wearing an almost glowing white shirt in front of a white background reinforces this god-like impression.

Obama has been on a “world tour” recently meeting various heads of state/government supposedly trying to rectify his perceived weakness as someone with a lack of foreign policy experience. While this is done with admirable intention, the concern is that, in addition to acting as if he were the current president of the USA, Obama has been taking extreme liberties with European leaders.

Obama seems uninterested in Europe, using it for his ‘experience building’ (as much experience as anyone can gain when they go on a holiday trip, despite being chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee responsible for the continent. The French newspaper Le Monde announced on July 24 that Obama has never asked to meet the European Union’s ambassador in Washington.

This primadonna behaviour was particularly evident not in Berlin, where he was greeted by about 200,000 cheering and fawning supporters, but in London, where he was given a low-key reception outside 10 Downing Street, which made him no more humble. He had a meeting with Gordon Brown followed by a press conference, which Obama conducted on his own, despite the fact that it would be unthinkable for a British prime minister to appear in the White House Rose Garden without the president.

At this stage of the campaign, rhetoric and personality takes priority over real policy, and for the moment at least, Europeans adore Obama. When it becomes time to talk about the issues, especially trade and defence, where Obama has advocated protectionism and hinted that Europe should commit more troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, the shine may wear off. Barack Obama has not even been elected yet, and may just be the hare to McCain’s tortoise.

The answer is, of course, impossible to tell at this stage; the parties are in the process of choosing their candidates. The one thing we can discern safely is that the reason that the race has started so early, and has been given so much media coverage, is because of the appalling current government. Now, Americans are so keen to get rid of George W. Bush, some members of congress are reviving calls to impeach the president (something that was ruled out months ago by Nancy Pelosi), while the public and media seems to have all but forgotten the loony lame-duck president.

There are 295 days to go though, which means about 42 weeks of campaigning. In the United Kingdom, there are a maximum of 3 weeks, by which time the nation is standing on a high ledge screaming “Someone please make the chattering stop!” However, Europeans may be forgiven for assuming that the Democrats will win the presidential election, regardless of whether they choose Barack Obama or Hilary Clinton. This is a mistake though, as it was though John Kerry could have won in 2004. While the Democrat Race is essentially a two-horse race, although John Edwards is a viable third choice, the Republican contest is much more difficult to predict. In the last few months, we have seen a huge comeback from John McCain (who won New Hampshire), Mike Huckabee has propelled himself from the fringe to the front (winning Iowa), while Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani have started to slip away.

On the Republican side, Mike Huckabee, with all his progressive and modern views (he does not believe in evolution, thinks foreign people should more-or-less be imprisoned, and has equated homosexuality with necrophilia) resonated with Iowans. Huckabee was also joined on stage throughout the Iowa campaign by Chuck Norris. Now, readers may be forgiven for thinking that there must be another Chuck Norris, perhaps a professor of politics somewhere or maybe even a lesser known senator; there’s no way he would take kung-fu star on stage with him, in a presidential primary. I am afraid you are wrong. It is that Chuck Norris, the one from Way of the Dragon and who has the same birthday as I do (March 10^th).

While it is anyone’s guess in the long term, the second primary, New Hampshire, has confounded absolutely everyone, not just in the journalistic circles, but also on the campaign buses. On the Democratic side, it was thought that Obama would be proclaimed the overall victor, having already won the Iowa vote. Clinton though, having come third place in Iowa, was able to pip Obama.

The analysts are working overtime. Never in history has every single poll been so dismally wrong; Obama showed a firm lead between the primaries, with no sign of slowing momentum. So the question is how did Hilary manage it? TIME Magazine lists about 30 different theories.

The other question has been the focus of some commentators, and one important theory; can Hilary cry herself to the White House? One explanation for her win in NH was her little emotional breakdown in a small café last Monday. A female voter has just asked her how she managed to stay so upbeat, which prompted a small display of tears. Usually criticised for being a witch, lacking humanity and compassion, it can be argued that this emotional outburst allowed her to endear herself to the women vote, a key demographic for Obama. The other explanation has been that younger and new voters, the cornerstone of the Obama support, failed to turn out in a significant enough number.

Everything is on the table; Prof. Jon Krosnick of Stanford University has another argument: That the order of names on the New Hampshire ballot – in which, by random draw, Clinton was toward the top, Obama at the bottom – netted her about 3 percentage points more than she would have had otherwise. European voters may find it hard to comprehend that this could actually make a difference, but around 40% of the voters who turned up were still undecided on the day.

Political theorists have also tried to understand the Obama defeat with an old phrase known as “The Bradley Effect” or in his case “The Reverse Bradley Effect”. It originates from a man named Tom Bradley in 1982 and his campaign to become Governor of California. Bradley was an African American and registered a consistent poll lead as the election approached, but then still lost. The idea behind the theory is that White voters try to make themselves look good by telling pollsters that they support a black candidate, when in fact they do not. The Iowa Primary was not a secret ballot, and so a voter could be seen whom they support by their neighbours. The population of Iowa is the third whitest in the country, so Iowans may well have supported Obama as a gesture, giving him the win (hence the ‘reverse’ effect). Conversely, as the New Hampshire choice was a secret ballot, it is likely that voters claimed to vote for Obama and told this to the pollsters, while actually voting for Hilary.

Still, do not assume it will be Obama or Clinton in the White House. The USA still has a firm republican base, it is important to realise that after the primaries, the real election will take place.

Article originally published in Impact on 14/01/08