Hail to the not-yet-Chief

The man who four short years ago addressed the Democratic party convention as a little-known state senator from Illinois will do so this August as his party’s nominee for president. It is the most rapid rise in the history of the Republic: not bad for the son of a Kenyan goat herder.

Barack Obama’s ascent is all the more remarkable for whom he has passed on the way up. Bill Clinton is the only Democratic president to have won two terms in the post-war era. Hillary Clinton has been marked out for greatness ever since her 1969 Wellesley commencement address; a speech that, in its time, received as much laudatory coverage as Obama’s one at the 2004 convention.

The Clintons had, over the years, assembled the most formidable political machine in modern Democratic politics. Obama was taking on a candidate who started with every conceivable advantage in terms of name recognition, organisation and fundraising. At the beginning of the campaign, there was even debate as to whether Obama could successfully compete for the black vote. He beat Hillary by turning politics on its head.

Take fundraising: the Clintons courted the big traditional donors who were prepared to ‘max out’, donating the legal maximum of $2,300 to the campaign. Obama parried brilliantly, exploiting the internet — the so-called ‘webroots’ — to raise money from a much greater number of people giving much smaller amounts. Five per cent of the US population have contributed to Obama’s campaign, and he has raised $265 million, of which almost half has been donated in sums of $200 or less. By the time the voting got underway, the Clintons were reduced to complaining about being out-spent. Campaign financing will never be the same again. If his presidential run has achieved nothing else it has shown that the corrupting influence of special interest money can be overpowered by the democratising of fundraising that the internet allows: a process started by Howard Dean in the 2004 campaign, now brought to triumphant conclusion.