MANILA, Philippines?The long-drawn US Democratic priimaries have become a battle over image and myth, the same way the US presidential elections have been decided in recent contests. Shouldn?t we all be concerned over how the world?s last remaining superpower chooses the leader of the free world? It?s a crazy way of electing a president, where spin-doctors and image-makers manipulate public opinion. The Philippines faces more basic problems, like phony counts and a President who phones the counters, but I wonder too whether we have already taken the same populist path.
The newspapers have reported that Hillary Clinton now portrays herself as a ?working-class hero.? John Lennon has a song by that title, and Hillary must have hearkened its lyrics: ?There?s room at the top they are telling you still/But first you must learn how to smile as you kill/If you want to be like the folks on the hill.?
While campaigning in the liberal Northeast, she managed to cast off her pugnacious mien, showed her softer side and even shed a tear in New Hampshire. Now campaigning in Southern and Midwestern America, she has taken to the rhetorical swagger of George W. Bush, vowing to ?obliterate Iran? if elected president. She has delivered speeches from the back of pick-up trucks. Speaking before a community college, she alluded to odd campus jobs that she worked in college. But it must take a master of image manipulation to make the common folk bond with a former first lady, product of Wellesley and Yale, and who with her husband earned $109 million in the past eight years.
In contrast, the African-American Barack Obama has been caricatured as even more elitist than, horror of horrors, the patrician John Kerry, senator from Massachusetts and Democratic presidential candidate who lost in the 2004 election. Kerry fit the elitist tag to a T. Sophisticated in language, demeanor and personality, a talk-show host proposed, in jest, that Kerry would be perfect as ?the president of Europe.?
But how could they depict Barack Obama as out of touch with the travails of small-town America?he, the son of an African father and a white mother, raised by his mother who moved with a stepfather from the United States to Indonesia, who later lived with his grandmother in Honolulu where he went to school, and who as a young man worked as a community organizer in the poor parts of Chicago? Certainly Barack could ?feel their pain,? to borrow that classic line as only Bill Clinton himself could so convincingly pronounce.
The strange thing is that it is actually easy to make this caricature stick. After all, the logic goes, a black guy couldn?t have gotten this far without becoming a little white, which alienates both the black voter and the poor and working class white voter. In other words, the genius of the Hillary campaign against Barack is that it transforms his strength into his weakness. Sure he is the unifying candidate. After all, isn?t he the black guy who traces his roots in the ?hood and eventually became the first non-white president of the Harvard Law Review? (I was a graduate student at Harvard when this historic event was announced, and I can still recall the excitement on campus and, yes, to use his words, the ?audacity of hope.?) And who better to reach out across the divide in both directions than one who has lived in both worlds?
And yet Hillary?s handlers have used Barack?s success and an unfortunate speech about the bitterness of small-town America to put a distance between him and his most natural constituents in the inner city, the farms and the factories. He ain?t one of you no more, brothers. And she seems to be scoring points, not enough apparently for her to win the nomination but still enough to keep Barack and the Democratic Party hostage to her scorched-earth strategy.
This wouldn?t be the first time that manipulated images persist against the facts in US politics. I recall when the elder George H.W. Bush slid down to vice president after he lost the Republican nomination to Ronald Reagan. Bush was hobbled by what the American press called the ?wimp? factor, despite the fact that it was Bush who was a bona fide war hero?the youngest naval aviator of his time, a fresh high school graduate when he enlisted for the task force that would fight in the Battle of the Philippine Sea?while Reagan did his military service in the safety of American soil and, I imagine, the comfort of the motion picture unit in the public relations desk.
The same thing with the contest between the younger George W. Bush and John Kerry in 2004, when the top campaign issue was the war in Iraq. This time, it was Bush whose war service record was questionable, who strangely appeared the more suitable commander in chief than Kerry, the bemedalled veteran of the Vietnam War.
Bush did absentee service, and merely at the Texas Air National Guard, despite scoring the lowest acceptable passing grade on the pilot?s written aptitude test, and never saw combat at a time when thousands of his cohorts were called to active service. In contrast, Kerry was a navy lieutenant, served two tours of duty in Vietnam, and was awarded three Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star, and a Silver Star. Upon his return, he became the first Vietnam vet to testify before Congress against the war.
And what did it take to demolish his proven heroism? A group calling itself ?Swift Boat Veterans for Truth,? some 200 Vietnam veterans who banded together against him during the 2004 campaign.
If the American voters are now called upon to find the working-class hero, then it?s time they listened to their president?s advice, George W. Bush?s all-time classic: ?Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, ? well ? I?m not gonna let you fool me again.?
