Are you ready for Obama mania?The man who may be the first black US president has transformed politics, writes Chris Stephen LOCK up your daughters, batten down the hatches, suspend your disbelief – the phenomenon known as Barack Obama rolls into Britain tonight.
Arriving by plane, or possibly magic carpet, the Democratic presidential candidate will tomorrow grace Gordon Brown and David Cameron with his presence before sweeping back to the United States after a global voyage best compared to a rock star's world tour.
Afghans, Iraqis, Israelis, Jordanians, Palestinians and Germans have already declared themselves mesmerised by Obamamania and yesterday's reception in Berlin, where tens of thousands turned out to hear him speak, cemented his position as an international superstar.
The hysteria is no less powerful back in the US, except that only just over half the population are swept up in it.
Teenagers are adopting his middle name as their own, a Chicago gallery is exhibiting art bearing his face, YouTube features a string of hits by Obama Girl and the internet is crammed with groups such as Knitters for Obama and Runners for Obama.
Not since John F Kennedy have Americans swooned before a politician, and even the Kennedy charm couldn't pack 75,000 people into a stadium in Seattle on a wet Sunday afternoon to hear a politician talk about the economy.
One magazine columnist said that when covering events for Hillary Clinton or John McCain he knew he could arrive shortly before kick-off and park outside. For an Obama event he either gets there an hour early or finds the car park jammed.
And both fans and critics say Obama's supporters treat him like the Messiah: "You want to follow him somewhere, anywhere," says actor George Clooney.
If there are no olive branches, Oscar-winner Halle Berry says she will find substitutes. "I'll collect paper cups off the ground to make his pathway clear."
This hysteria has already added several expressions to the lexicon. Aside from Obamamania there are the Obamacans, his young supporters, who promise to "Barack Your World".
Meanwhile John McCain has screamed "media bias!" as he struggles to get his own message out in a week when all three TV networks sent their anchors to follow Obama around the world.
The bias is undeniable, but opinion is divided about the reason. Some say American journalists are closet liberals, others that Obama is simply more exciting.
And some wonder if God has a hand in it: Wednesday night's TV news kicked off with shots of Obama looking statesmanlike in the sunshine with Israeli president Shimon Peres. Then it cut to John McCain, whose campaign visit that day to meet regular folks in a supermarket was undercut when one of his aides tripped and knocked down a shelf of apple sauce bottles.
For all the criticism that Obama's soaring rhetoric lacks substance, some of his one-word philosophy, "Change", has already come to pass.
He is, for instance, not just the first black to be in pole position for the presidency, but the first candidate with "Hussein" as his middle name, and this only five years after the invasion of Saddam's Iraq.
Meanwhile he has turned conventional wisdom about elections on its head. A year ago many feared for American democracy, worried that huge sums would be poured into this election campaign.
They were right, with Obama on course to raise half a billion dollars, but the cash comes not from greedy capitalists but from the rank and file, namely an army of a million and a half contributors, almost all giving online.
For he is the first candidate in history to understand fully the power of the internet. Not just to allow Obamacans to form their own groups and hold their own events, but also allowing his fundraisers to ask for sums of $5 a time. Writing a cheque for five bucks and mailing it seems silly. Doing it with the click of a mouse is painless.
And then there are his fans. Weren't young people supposed to be apathetic and turned off politics?
Part of the reason for Obama's success is the catastrophic loss of faith in politics-as-usual. George W Bush may be the most unpopular president since the Second World War, but his 28 per cent approval rating looks positively stratospheric next to that of the Democrat-controlled Congress, at an all-time low of 9 per cent.
For millions of Americans, their politicians are fiddling while Rome burns. The economy is going to hell, helped by greedy bankers, tax cuts for the rich and monumental incompetence, whether over Iraq or Hurricane Katrina.
Meanwhile, the old Communist bogeymen of China and Russia are back. The papers are full of stories of Russia strangling its enemies by cutting off gas supplies and China flooding the US with spies and Sudan and Zimbabwe with arms.
Arriving into this mess like a brick through a plate glass window is Barack Obama. Good looking, young, sharply-dressed and articulate, he is the epitome of the Can-Do American success story.
To his credit, he is putting flesh on the bones of his claim to reach across traditional party lines.
Liberal in thought, he is nevertheless a tough guy, lecturing the black political establishment on the need to replace a culture of victimhood with one of "personal responsibility."
And in an age that has seen the "dumbing down" of politicians, Obama is almost indecently intelligent. Psychology Today highlights Obama's comment that if Iraq could not stand on its own feet in seven years, "we're not going to get them to stand up in 14 or 28 or 56 years". How many people, it asks, could whip out, unrehearsed, a doubling progression like that?
Put all that together and you have Obamamania.
"People are just so stoked for what they see as a competent individual," said Mike White, a businessman in the key swing state of Ohio. "People want to have hope, people are mesmerised by someone who is this articulate, this competent."
Or, as several commentators have mentioned, someone who is "NGB" – Not George Bush, a man whose intellect seems to rival that of the late president Gerald Ford who, it was said, "could not walk and chew gum at the same time".
The irony is that Obama has borrowed much of his politics from the other side of the aisle. His "personal responsibility" mantra is the cornerstone of the Republican Party.
And McCain's Big Idea, a League of Democracies to bind the US with Europe, Australia, Brazil, India and Japan is the unofficial guiding principle of Obama's multilateralist foreign policy.
The wonder, in the US, is not that Obama has energised a population riven by self-doubt and anxiety, but that he is barely leading McCain in the polls.
Obamamania may stretch across party lines in Europe but back home, it has failed to cross the blue-red divide: The blue, Democrat states on both coasts and around Chicago love him, the Republican red states in between have been left cold.
Part of the reason is simple racism, as pervasive in some southern states as it is generally absent in the Yankee north.
And partly it is that Obama, for all his fizz, is unproven. In the primaries, the voters split between those doing well, who felt it worth taking a chance on Obama, and those up against the wall, who went for Clinton, and may vote McCain for the same reason.
Obama's one and only notable decision from his few years in politics, and the one his supporters say he can hang his hat on, is his opposition in 2003 to the invasion of Iraq. At the time his was a voice in the wilderness in a country gripped by hysteria.
We now know that Obama was right and pretty much everybody else was wrong, proof for his supporters that "judgment" really does trump "experience".
Obama's lead may only be four points, but everyone knows this election is all about him. Americans like Obama. If they decide also that they can trust him, he'll be the next president. If not, they will vote for that human default position that is smiling, doddery 71-year-old John McCain.
http://news.scotsman.com/opinion/Are-you-ready-for-Obama.4324421.jp
