Reclaiming Democracy

“Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything” – Josef Stalin 1878-1953

Eight years after the debacle of the Florida recount, America stands on the threshold of being able to reclaim its democracy in spectacular fashion. Having had the 2000 election stolen from them by a combination of Republican Party skullduggery and an unprecedented intrusion into the American body politic by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Democrats are poised to win back the White House in what could be a landslide result this November.

The withdrawal of Senator Clinton from the race for the Democratic nomination for President, in one of the best concession speeches in modern political history, positions Barack Obama as the presumptive nominee of his party, a status which will be confirmed when he is officially nominated at the Democratic National Convention in Denver on August 28th. History has a strange way of crystallizing the importance or significance of an event. In a classic case of historical political redux, Obama will be nominated as the first African American nominee for President by either party, 45 years to the day that Dr. King gave his famous “I have a dream” speech at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C.

Obama’s journey on his way to the nomination is also America’s journey. As America is a melting pot of races, nationalities and people of different color and ethnicity, Obama is the embodiment of all that can be achieved when disparate peoples come together for the common good. Barack Obama, who was born in Hawaii, is the child of a black Kenyan father who came to the United States in 1960 to live out his version of the American dream, and a white American woman from Kansas. Obama’s crossover appeal to large swathes of Republicans and Independents as well as Democrats is symptomatic of how average Americans have, during the lifetime of the presidency of George W Bush, come full circle and are rejecting the politics of division and partisanship that have been the corner stone of the Bush administration and, until 2006, the Republican controlled Congress.

Americans are well aware that the world is watching. John McCain is a decorated war hero and former POW, but he represents the past and all that is repugnant about traditional Beltway politics. Apart from a few occasions where he bucked his party’s position on certain policies, (e.g. the immigration issue), John McCain has simultaneously held divergent and contradictory views on a whole host of issues spanning his 30 years in Washington. He has tied himself to the failed policies of George W Bush, most notably the Iraq war and the economy, and ultimately these positions will play an important role in the decision of the voters come November.

I truly believe that Barack Obama will be the 44th President of the United States of America.