• English Site
• > World
• > United States

The Super Tuesday Showdown

Candidates Invoke Ghosts of the Political Past

By Klaus Brinkbäumer and Cordula Meyer

The US presidential election campaign is becoming more heated, fiercer and grotesque. In the final spurt before Super Tuesday, the candidates are invoking the memories of their parties' legendary figures, Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy. Meanwhile, the Clintons are invoking memories of -- the Clintons.

It was a clear, cold winter morning in Washington when the Kennedys finally reached into the wheels of world politics again. Caroline Kennedy said she had been waiting half of her life for a politician who is like her father, and this man had finally arrived. She stood on a small stage in the auditorium at American University, wearing a grey blazer, smiling shyly and pushing her brown hair behind her ears.

"Barack Obama is the president we need," she said to an audience of cheering students, before looking over at her uncle.

"He will be a president who refuses to be trapped in the patterns of the past," Senator Edward "Teddy" Kennedy, the younger brother of President John F. Kennedy and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, both of whom were assassinated, told the crowd. "He has the power to inspire and make America good again," Kennedy the elder statesman roared, speaking with a forcefulness that surprised many in the audience.

It was the most moving moment in an election campaign that has seemed more hysterical than anything else. At that moment, it seemed that Barack Obama had achieved everything he had ever wanted to. Looking like a man who had finally arrived and been anointed, he rubbed his right eye, swallowed and flashed his winning smile.

It had happened the way it was supposed to. Even choreographed emotions can be real, and Obama was displaying his emotions, his pathos and his patriotism to the fullest. It was that connection between the past and the present that all of the candidates in this peculiar campaign, which has already reached a climax so early in the game, strive for. The message and the upshot of that Tuesday in Washington was that Obama was being likened to Kennedy, and the country's glorious past under JFK to a glorious future under Obama.

The 12 serious contenders who entered the presidential race have already spent an estimated $600 million on the campaign. Everything that could possibly be said has been said, repeated dozens of times and modified down to the last nuance. Everything has been interpreted, and every facial expression, every tear and every smile has been written about and recorded on camera thousands of times.

A Democratic Toss-Up

So where does all this leave the race?

Nothing has been settled or decided, and the big prize, the White House, won't be handed out until November. But the first major climax in the primaries will happen on Tuesday, when 22 states hold their primaries in what has come to be known as Super Tuesday.

The expected outcome of Tuesday's vote is still a toss-up between the two Democratic frontrunners still in the race. While Republican voters seem a little closer to reaching a decision, many of them aren't exactly thrilled with the selection. This relative lack of certainty forces the candidates to perform a difficult balancing act. Both parties have discovered how important it is that their candidates come across as fresh and unspoiled, and under no circumstances as Washington insider candidates, which, in the United States, essentially means "rotten, corrupt and completely spoiled." At the same time, voters want to see candidates who remind them of the great leaders of the past, candidates who inspire them, candidates who make history.

For the Democrats, that great leader is former President John F. Kennedy, and for the Republicans it is former President Ronald Reagan. It's an equation that seems to be turning out well for Obama at the moment. He has managed to mesmerize America by talking about his dreams. He says that he wants to change America, this "society of owners, in which the winners take all and the losers walk away with nothing," and his audiences believe him, perhaps because he can tell them about how he worked his way up from humble beginnings, and about how he felt free and yet alone in this big, cold country. "We want to be great again," he calls out to the audience, with his wife, Michelle, as clever as she is beautiful and obstinate, at his side, doing her part to boost the magic factor in this election campaign.

Is he a new Kennedy? Of course not. But Obama needs this image -- the comparisons to JFK -- to succeed. Americans have already been prepared for the idea of blacks in power by TV shows like "24," which has portrayed a country under siege with a fair-minded and extremely shrewd African American at its helm. But in real life Obama cannot simply mimic the fictional President David Palmer of "24" fame. Instead, he must fashion himself into a new Kennedy so that, on Super Tuesday, he can win over white women, Hispanic men and the elderly -- all those groups that still favor his rival, Hillary Clinton.

Back to the Future

If he does end up securing his party's nomination, Obama will need the Kennedy mystique more than ever -- if he is to stand a chance against white, Republican America. In a televised debate two weeks ago, the Republican candidates were ready to talk about how they planned to lead the United States, still a superpower, into the future, but because the debate took place in South Carolina, a Southern state, and was broadcast by the conservative Fox News Network, patriotism was the first item on the agenda. A country singer sang the national anthem, while a pair of Southern belles, women in white, strapless dresses, sang along.

The debate highlighted the Republicans' problem. Instead of dealing with the challenges of today, the candidates simply kept up the nostalgia. The six men sitting on the stage in South Carolina all promised voters that their goal was to reconnect with the supposedly glorious 1980s. Their recipe for the future is nothing but a return to the past of former President Ronald Reagan.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said that he would reduce government spending, "the way I did as mayor of New York City, the way Ronald Reagan did it as president of the United States." Then there was John McCain: "I'm proud to have been a member of the Reagan revolution, a foot soldier." Mike Huckabee, for his part, claimed to have been part of it all when Republicans were at the top of their game: "I was a part of it in 1979 and a lot of the evangelicals who became a part of helping Ronald Reagan to be elected."

Mitt Romney, not surprisingly, was especially eager to identify himself with Reagan. "The principles that Ronald Reagan espoused are what will allow us not only to win the White House, but to keep America strong," the former Massachusetts governor said. He went on to rave about how "Ronald Reagan said we're going to have such a strong military, we'll out-compete the Soviets, and he did." The problem with the government in Washington, according to Romney, is that it has strayed too far from Reagan's principles.

Democratic candidate Barack Obama has declared the campaign a duel between the past and the future. The past he is talking about is one that has been dominated by the Bush clan and, of course, the Clinton clan, a past made up of cynicism and lies, constant partisan bickering and intrigues. Of course, the past Obama is talking about also includes Ronald Reagan.

For Obama -- and, with him, an army of students and Americans below the age of 50 who have turned into a mass phenomenon informally dubbed the "Obama Nation" -- the future is constructive. It's a future characterized by solidarity and communication, a tolerant and multilateral future -- young, honest and tremendously modern. According to this logic, Kennedy isn't part of the past, but instead has been reincarnated as Obama in 2008.

The Obama phenomenon has swept across the country in a wave of pop culture, religion, patriotism and dreams. Every Obama speech sounds like a song. No other candidate in this campaign is able to speak as rhythmically as Obama, who constantly punctuates his words with the refrain: "Yes, we can."