Good News from America

The American is no longer an idiot, one dares to say. Having covered Bush’s re-election campaign 4 years ago (1), I saw how the discouraging mixture of gay marriage-abortion- family-religion-terrorism, stirred in the cauldron of moral values, led whole states into the Dubya’s arms.

The ‘real’ American, according to conservative beliefs, is white, family-oriented, a patriot, extremely religious, detests socialism, communism, foreigners and paying taxes. This ‘real’ American is so naive that he believes the way to save America is by attacking Iraq and, he has a mission anyhow, i.e. to promote the model of his country among other people (without asking their opinion). This American, if he did exist, does not exist any more. It’s the terrible discovery that McCain and the Republican camp have made, and a great piece of news for American and the rest of the world. With five days to go, the situation has become clear: Obama is going to win because the America which McCain and Palin are addressing is no longer hearing their views. The white American – who McCain calls Joe the Plumber and Palin calls Joe Six-Pack – no longer accepts such lies. He has seen the war in Iraq and is experiencing the crisis, so the Republican pipe dreams regarding abortion, taxes or American victory in Iraq no longer affect him. The most recent survey shows that half of white Americans will vote Democrat for the first time in 30 years! They now want someone practical, calm and moderate at the center. They refuse to scorn intellectuals, the famous ‘elite’ denounced by the McCain camp; Obama is a Harvard graduate. They refuse to fear (Bin Laden, America’s enemies, etc). The white male American has shut the doors to outdated ideological unrest and has entered into the era of rationalism. Furthermore, it was the Republican president Ronald Reagan, who intelligently said “I hope that history will remember that I appealed to our greatest hopes and not our worst fears.” The white American female is also no fool. Should all female Americans feel like Sarah Palin based on the fact that the Republican candidate is a super mother of five children, the governor of Alaska and is sexy, too? The male population was won over in the beginning, but a resounding majority of women have not fallen for biological blackmail. American women are not voting for Palin, and if some day they choose to vote for a female candidate, it will be for her ideas and not for her feminine nature. Women’s Lib has finally won the battle, after all; women are voters just like the others (or better) …

The black American has also become liberated through this extraordinary adventure. He has overcome his wariness of the almost white Obama who refuses to speak in terms of black or white, minorities and quotas, recriminations and hatred. He doesn’t speak ‘ghetto’ language but expresses himself in the same way as any other chic Harvard Professor would. And crowds of African-Americans are hurrying to vote early in absolute enthusiasm for the candidate who hasn’t taken up the old leitmotifs of the black community. And, as they say, also rationally, they are proud but they are not voting for Obama because he is black but because they like him as a candidate.

This tour of real Americans, as opposed to those which the conservators have imagined, can be continued. The Hispanic American is rushing to the polls. The 44% who voted for Bush during last election has shrunk. Hispanics are overcoming their traditional antipathy towards blacks and are putting Obama-Biden signs on their lawns and affixing stickers to the backs of their cars. They will probably tip the vote in undecided states, and if it doesn’t happen this time, it will happen in four years with the increase in the demographic strength of these new Americans.

Finally, young male and female Americans no longer want to put up with an arrogant, hated America or an old rambling white man. They don’t care about color, they want hope and solidarity. Of course, Republicans have a stronghold in rural areas and among religious extremists, those with a sense of nostalgia and probably a few racists, but their power is dissolving. The small-town America which covered the entire red Republican political map between the two blue Democrat coasts has disintegrated. The Republicans might even lose the majority in the Senate. There aren’t two Americas but there are Americans and they have rediscovered, as the Nobel Prize for Economics winner Paul Krugman says, the virtue of seriousness in a world that seems to be crumbling.

(1) Chroniques de la guerre du sexe en Amérique (Grasset Livre de Poche).