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Saturday 22 November 2008

New York Diary

New York Diary

Tina Brown on why New York Christmases are bigger and bolder than celebrations elsewhere and why Barack Obama is the political toast of the holiday season.

The difference this year is that the conversations at holiday parties are unseasonably political. Now that the voting dates in the ‘early states’ have been scrunched forward to just after New Year’s Day, the only thing people want to talk about in New York is which Democrat will win Iowa and New Hampshire. The Barack Obama surge — the pollsters have him sprinting ahead — is a counterintuitive nightmare for Hillary Clinton. The prospect of becoming the first female president of the United States was Hillary’s clarion call to history — until Obama trumped her with the promise of becoming the first black one. Bedevilling both are the paradoxical, mirror-image facts that Hillary, whose exceptionalism is based on being a woman, hasn’t been winning over quite enough women and Barack, whose exceptionalism is based on being black, hasn’t been winning over quite enough blacks. That’s why it’s holy hell for Hill that the one person who’s an answer to both problems — Oprah Winfrey, the all powerful African-American talk-show queen, who would surely have been a cinch for Clinton if Obama hadn’t got into the act — is out there drawing rock-star crowds, stumping for Obama (30,000 showed up in New Hampshire last weekend, most of them black).

I personally prefer Hillary when her back’s to the wall. That grating Midwestern voice going negative at last is music to my ears after six months of her in that imperturbable pantsuit parsing out positions that have been poll-tested to death. On the debate podium when she faces him down with a basilisk stare she reduces Barack to Bambi. There was such relish in the way she mocked him for citing his childhood in Indonesia as a factor in his understanding of foreign affairs. ‘Voters,’ she scoffed, ‘will judge whether living in a foreign country till the age of ten prepares one to face the big complex international challenges the next president will face.’ The trouble is that Barack has been a genius at turning Hillary’s calling card of Experience into a synonym for Old. He retaliates by evoking those walking cuss words, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, whose experience, like hers, took us into Iraq.

I am told that such is the panic in Camp Clinton it has become more of a priority to Hillary to see Obama lose Iowa and New Hampshire than win them for herself. If the third most popular candidate, John Edwards, comes in first, it’s OK by her — she’s sure she can pick off that empty suit further down the line. If Obama wins, she fears, his momentum could make him unstoppable. I’m not so sure. I tend to think that Obama’s gains are linked to foreign affairs having temporarily lost their heat. If Iran were about to blow and the Iraq body counts mounted again, voters would be inclined to favour whoever seemed toughest: Hillary for the Dems, Rudy Giuliani for the Republicans. (It’s another counter-intuitive paradox that most Democrats feel that in a terrorist attack the first woman president would be fearless in taking the enemy out while Obama might sit around being thoughtful about his ‘politics of hope’.) But with the death toll falling in Iraq, and Iran abruptly declared a nuclear non-threat after all, voters feel free to tap into their softer, more utopian instincts — the touchy-feely stuff that Oprah appeals to — for now. It’s Christmas after all.

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