Voting for Barack Obama.

I'm voting for Barack Obama in this election. 

Ok.  I know I'm not legally entitled to a vote since I'm a British citizen through and through.  That doesn't bother me:  along with most other Europeans, I shall be casting my vote for him.

In virtual reality…….

If indeed we Europeans did have the vote (as we should!), then Obama would win hands down.

There are three aspects to Barack Obama’s campaign that we all like over on this side of the Atlantic.  

The first is his attitude to race.  Obama is the first black politician who has managed to attract black support without presenting himself particularly as a black candidate.  Yet, at the same time, he celebrates his mixed race heritage.  Difficult as it is to achieve, Obama has avoided being cast as having black-only politics, for the first time in a presidential campaign.  To me, he transcends the do’s and don’t’s of political correctness and stands for a more fluid, pragmatic political identity.  The usual questions about which side he supports on equality issues are avoided in favour of the major issues that concern the broad electorate at the moment.

He comes across as someone who is used to working with local communities on different kinds of issues without having to nail his own values to the flag post.  Andrew Rosenheim, in an article on his background for the British magazine Prospect, says that Obama brings to any problem an ‘unpartisan intelligence’ and quotes Geof Stone, the Univ<?xml:namespace prefix = st1 />ersity of Chicago’s Provost that Obama  “was not a proselytizer… He was effective in getting students to understand issues, not persuading them what they should think about them.  He’s a very empathic person’.

I like this kind of empathy.  Hopefully, it will resonate with all the different race groups, as well as WASPs, that make up American society.  Initially there was scepticism about his approach, but I sense that the narrow mindedness has now abated for a broader support instead.

The second aspect of the campaign that I like is the speed with which he has espoused the ‘netroots’ movement; the extension of social networking into a grassroots political activism, involving campaigning, fundraising and advocacy.  Peter Jukes, a British writer on cyberspace, says that the political blogosphere has come of age with this presidential campaign. Howard Dean was the first to recognize the potential of cyberspace for creating digital constituencies that could mobilize coalitions not previously involved in this kind of politics.

It has brought in a huge, diverse following of people. Cyberspace has become the new centre of gravity to campaigning.  And the Obama campaign has been open to working in tandem with this cyber-whirlpool. 

Debates ebb and flow on the web, a torrent of opinions and arguments crash against each other, analyses swirl into polemics, contentious currents are splashed with accusations and insults, as the 100,000 or so active members of a site like Daily Kos sport twenty million hits a week. This netroots movement has co-opted an unimaginable range of new talent, imagination and energy into this tired politics.  What I most like is that this dynamic cannot be contained, or directed.  Yet no one is bothered. And it is a completely bottom-up, sort of community politics defined, not in streets or neighbourhoods, but in cyber space.

The third aspect of this campaign that excites me is the way religion has been acknowledged as a critical force in US public life and welcomed into the campaign this time.  Democrats lost religion to the Republicans long ago. This has seriously dented their support up to now.  But this faith tent does not insist in being "washed in the Blood of the Lamb" or saying so many Hail Marys.  It does not encompass a new religious left to replace the religious right:  it is far more eclectic than that.  It draws in Islamic imams, Buddhists, Catholics, Jews, Pentecostalists and all the other evangelicals.  As the evangelical activist Reverend Jim Wallis said at Obama’s acceptance speech at the Convention, “faith has become cool”. 

Religion no longer divides as it always has done in the past:  Catholics versus evangelicals; anti-abortionists versus right-to-choosers, etc, etc.  Instead, it has come of age and rejected this old straight jacket of shibboleths.  This may partly reflect the movement towards a more ‘pick ‘n mix’ approach to religion.  It also signals that Democrats at last recognise that religious people have wider concerns.  Faith voters want to debate education or material greed or elder abuse; they too care for the environment. They also want to make poverty history just as much as do secular voters. This time around religious diversity has been taken on board, just as Obama has presented himself as far more than an ethnic candidate who offers a black-only politics. 

I am left with the feelings of a freshness, and a vitality in presidential politicking this time around.  Obama has talked about the need for change on Capital Hill.  He has also shown something of how this change permeates the Democratic party by opening up to these new constituencies.  Amid all the razzmatazz of American presidential campaigns, it is this that excites me about Obama.

That is why I'm going to vote for him.