JESSICA MATTHEWS, PRESIDENT OF THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE; MARVIN KALB, PROFESSOR EMERITUS AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY,
USA

Jessica MATTHEWS, President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

I will outline the most notable points about the current presidential campaign.

• This is first time in more than half a century that the US is not having sitting president or vice-president running, so this is the first really open presidential primary campaign since 1952. What that did was to produce enormous number of candidates, about 18 on both sides, and representing enormous diversity of views, the whole spectre of American politics including the lunatics. This openness generated enormous participation and enormous diversity of views.
• Secondly, we have seen the tremendous importance of money. The amount of money that the Democrats have raised has shattered all the records. George W. Bush shattered all the records last time, but both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have raised more than a hundred million dollars each in 2007. So they have more than doubled the biggest record for the amount raised.
• Number three, something that is really brand new is that in contrast to money mattering on Democratic side, it has not mattered on the Republican side. We have an amazing phenomenon that the two remaining candidates John McCain and Mike Huckabee are broke and have been broke. While one candidate, Senator Romney, spent some say 57 million, I’ve heard different sums, 35 and 40 million dollars. But John McCain who gathered significant amount blew through it and is basically broke ever since. And Mike Huckabee didn’t have any money. And this is brand new.
• Another point is the role of the Internet. This came up in 2004 but it came to maturation in this election. From the point of view of a person who works inside the campaign I can say that the toughest choice during the campaign all the time is between the people who want the candidate out on the campaign tour and the people who want the candidate’s time to be spent on the fundraisers. Barack Obama has done something unbelievable, he spent a lot of money - 2 million dollars - setting up an extraordinary website early and because he was able to attract people’s interest he has generated a number of donors that nobody else has ever remotely approached. So that throughout the month of January he raised million dollars a day at no cost in either dollars or campaign time. The candidate didn’t have to spend a minute on fundraising in that period of time. It’s not just the time you spend at the event, it’s the time you spend on the phone with donors who want to tell you what to do, and the time you must spend with people who have raised for you very large sums of money and now they are going to tell you how you are going to campaign. And this is a diversion inside the campaign, for those people have to be nurtured, stroke and cared for; you have all these people on the pone telling them strategy. And the freedom that Obama enjoys for having this tideway of money that comes in every day without any real efforts - million dollars a day every day. For anybody who has ever worked in the campaign this is a nirvana. This phenomenon is going to transform our political system, it has already, but it will do it in a big way, because the role of big money donors is diminished beyond anybody’s wildest dreams. On both ends, that John McCain could win and Mike Huckabee survive without any money along now and that Obama could win without worrying about big donors and yet generating massive sums of money (the number of donors that he now has, is some 150 thousand) is something new. American campaign finance law limits individual donations up to 2300 dollars. You can do what is called bottling, which is you go out and raise that same amount from a hundred or a thousand of people and then you could become a big donor who have to be taken care of. I should mention that while the Internet has an enhanced role for niche candidates, it is important for other candidates. And the opposite to niche candidate is Ron Paul, whose program doesn’t make any sense, he runs as a Republican, while any of his positions is democratic. So that man was donated 4,3 million dollars one day on the Internet, it’s just another campaign record. This mechanism, the Internet, empowers different kinds of candidates.
• Every four years we say we had the longest campaign ever. But this one began in early 2006; the candidates have been campaigning every day throughout 2007. So the remaining candidates have been on the campaign trip day after day for more than a year. Throughout that period, all of 2007, both sides had overriding frontrunners by 20-25 percentage points. And one of them is gone, it is Giuliani, and the other is now an underdog Hillary Clinton. And that is interesting.
• There are at least three very important ways in which the relationship between our two political parties has changed. In the last several decades, since the 1960s, the Democratic party has been riven by tremendous ideological differences. This year it is the Republican party that is riven by huge ideological differences. Still as you know, John McCain is trying to reach the base of the Republican party. What is interesting is that the demand for ideological purity comes from parties that are under decline: when you grow you are in a phase where you feel confident enough in people with more views, when you’re under defensive you become the party of ideological purity, so you can have somebody with whom you share 8 out of 10 views but if they are wrong on sensitive issues - on abortion, on gay marriage, - it was this group of issues that divided the Democratic party. But now it is the Republican party that is riven by those differences and, I think, it is very odious. Secondly, another change, a switch from the last three decades has been that the Democrats are massively outfundraising the Republicans. The Republicans have outfundraised the Democrats every year since Ronald Reagan, and that now has changed. Third is the difference in voter turnout and enthusiasm. On Tuesday, 12 February, in Virginia Obama got a hundred and fifty thousand more votes than all the Republicans put together and that has been the pattern throughout since the voting began. Turnout has been up in both parties but vastly more so in the Democratic party.

So where are we now? We have two frontrunners - the oldest and the youngest - in the race. One is the confirmed frontrunner with a great advantage, who now will be able to think solely about the general election. But here you have a very odd situation where people are still voting for Romney long after he got out of the race, in large numbers. These are people who are saying we are not happy with John McCain, and these are core Republicans. And the most specific thing of all, you have the two candidates of all the 18, who have the strongest appeal, the two who are known. Asuming Obama gets the nomination, you would have a race unique in our political history.

Marvin KALB, Professor Emeritus at Harvard University

This is an election that most Americans can be proud of. It is the first time in American history that we have a woman running, who has serious chance to be president of the United States; the first time that we have an African American running, who also has serious chance to become president. There were moments in America’s history when the American people understood that they are on the edge of a major change, and I think we are in one of these moments right now. It was such a moment early after the American Revolution, after the American Civil War, at the end of the XIX century there was the scholar who came up with something we now call the Turner thesis, which was that America can do anything, there is simply no border. That idea went through American history - WWI, WWII - and then the speed of the American locomotive began to ease up and we went into the war in Korea for example where we were forced to settle for the draw rather than victory, except for the war in 1820 that was the only time in the American history when that happened, and then we were into the Vietnam war that was lost. On April 30 of 1975 Americans held on to the armored helicopters to be lifted to the roof of the American embassy. After that time the entire American political system, military system understood that something huge had happened and we had to reorder central priorities. But America is a resilient, ebullient country, and there was massive economic expansion in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. But somewhere at the end of the Cold War we again entered one of those periods till the early 1990s when we weren’t quite sure where we were.

We already are in one of those moments when the US is involved in another war, which is unpopular, which is very costly not just in money, I am talking about the soul of the country, about the way the country looks at itself, its military and political system. We still feel that there is little out there we can do, except we know that we can. So when this campaign got started it was a perfect opportunity for new people to come in with new ideas and to try to come up with a formula, pattern, a way of behaving responsive to the new times. Except that every single time of the America’s history when there is a moment when we’ve got to leapfrog reality we’ve just been in - right now it is the presidency of George W. Bush and the Iraq war - when we try to get beyond that, all the challenges of the war on terrorism, it is really not clear what is the best way for the US.

And so we now face an almost certainty, a Republican nominee, 72 year old Senator from Arizona who spent 5,5 years in a prison in Hanoi, a most remarkable man in a number of different ways. During the time that he was in a Hanoi prison, he was given the opportunity three times to leave the prison, because his father was in charge of American naval force and he was based in Honolulu. He said, no, unless you release all the American prisoners, I stay with them. That takes guts, and that takes a kind of courage and belief in yourself and your country. He still has that. He also has, what is called, the ‘straight talk express’ and he has begun to raise money now that he is the frontrunner. He has this ability to sit down with any reporter in sight and give that reporter an exclusive story. And any reporter wants to feel that he has an access to a candidate and is capable of getting an exclusive story. All this means that John McCain has not ever seriously been tested, because the media gives him pretty much of a fuss, because he is a war hero. He is capable also to be a political maverick and will take positions almost deliberately to offend the heart and soul of the Republican party, so he will join up with Senator Kerry and then will find another liberal-democrat and come up with yet another program. All of the Republicans would be saying to him, you are going to be our guy, - like a stallion that has to be bent to the will of a good rider - they are saying, we are going to break you, we are going to bend you to our needs. He doesn’t like that and there is a chronic tension between the heart and soul of the Republican party and its candidate. It’s exactly the reverse of the way it normally is in the American politics, it is normally that a candidate first solidifies the base of this party, then reaches out to the independence. This is another way round and that is McCain.

Take a look at the Democrats. For those of you who think you may know Obama or Clinton, you probably know them but only on the surface. These are both extraordinarily intelligent, determined, brave politicians. Senator Clinton has accented this point time and time again that she is the one with experience; she means ‘I have been at the White House with president Clinton for 8 years. We are very close, we both love policy’. When President Clinton discussed policy I am sure he discussed it with her. Since then it has been 7 years when Senator Clinton has been to the US Senate, and by the way was a very successful, hardworking Senator. Talk to any New-Yorker who needs a favor and she has got the kind of locus that will provide it. She is a smart, cunning politician. I think she is also tougher than we realize.

Her principal competitor, Barack Obama is a man who has been to the Senate now for almost four years; before that he was State Senator in Illinois. He has written two books: he wrote the first one before he was a politician, the other one when he already knew that he would run for the presidency. If you read the first book, you’ll get inside an exceptional mind written with an appreciation of the beauty of the English language. This is the first major American politician since John Kennedy who can write English and speak it so well, as a matter of fact he enjoys writing his own speeches, because he doesn’t feel and he is right that the speechwriters can write it up to the level that he wants. In the book you’ll find a man searching for his identity, a man half white, half black. His mother was white woman from Kansas, father was a Kenyan student who came to the US. The two met, fell in love, married. But before Barack was two years old the couple got parted, his father just left, little boy stayed with his white mother and white grandparents. Those were three people who raised him and she then married again and moved up to Indonesia and then back to Honolulu. This is a man for whom home has been a combination of many places. And with that combination came the appreciation of the diversity of the world, the need to know languages, the need to open oneself to different cultures. I don’t think he felt he was going to get into politics until, probably, mid-80s, at which point he got in, and again through luck, with running an absolute nobody in Illinois and wining. And then suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere people began to recognize him. That was the key moment - the Democratic passion of the election 2004 and the key personality was the democratic presidential candidate John Kerry from Massachusetts who selected absolutely obscure politician to deliver a speech at the Democratic Party Convention, and that was an extraordinary speech. And he suddenly was there. Almost overnight people began to say ‘who was this guy, who does he represent?’ Then he decided to run, he wrote this other book, where he set forward his program, people loved it. And then this question came up, is this your moment? And he decided yes. In American politics when your moment comes and you let it pass, you may have lost it forever. This is your time, go for it. When he made that decision, he certainly didn’t know he was going to be where he is today. And yet combination of this capacity to utterly entrance the audience, to generate enthusiasm among young people, his way looking at camera served him well. Obama was never taught that, he simply knew it. He is great on the camera. Political reality comes to people in Russia just like in America in a rectangular. It is only through the lens of the television camera that politicians persuade the United States, with its more than 300 million people, that he or she should be the next president.

Anyone who covers American politics would say that now it is the big momentum. When you got the Big Mo, as George Bush Senior put it, what is important is the impression that inevitably you are the guy. If that impression is out there and it holds for a while, for 3-4 days, then people who want the money here, get the money here.

But if that were that simple and if this were an election in which everything were according to a plan, I would say right now bet your money on Obama. But that is not in the nature of this candidate, there has always been a surprise. So as for now, we can only guess who will win.

The material is based on Jessica Matthews and Marvin Kalb's address to the press conference "Presidential election in the USA: another Republican in the White House or a Democrat ready to end the war in Iraq?" held at the Carnegie Moscow Center on February 14, 2008.

February 20, 2008

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