Columnists - Shashi Tharoor

Why this US presidential election matters

After all those heady, exciting, nail-biting months when primary succeeded caucus and every political junkie in America became a self-appointed expert in delegate math, US presidential politics is in a curious lull these days. The presumptive Republican nominee, John McCain, trots off to Latin America, while the Democratic standard-bearer, Barack Obama, heads for the Middle East and Europe. Both are trying to look presidential by beaming home to American voters images of themselves looking worldly-wise with foreign leaders. Neither has enough to do at home: there are still weeks to go before the Democratic Convention at the end of August and the Republican one at the beginning of September, which will officially anoint the two nominees. The US presidential election calendar is one of those oddities that makes American politics quite unlike any other country's. The first candidacies are declared sometimes three years before the vacancy in the White House becomes due (in this case, President Bush leaves office on January 20, 2009, but many of those intending to replace him had thrown their hats in the ring in 2006). A great deal of time is then spent fund-raising, since the initial viability of a candidacy is established by the dollars raised rather than any votes won. Some candidates drop out before a single vote is cast, if they languish in the public opinion polls that prospective donors (and the media experts who can make or break candidates) read. Finally, the primary season starts in the January of the election year. It can continue all the way into early June, as it did in the case of the Democrats, but more typically one candidate sews up the nomination by March, as McCain did this time. Then a couple of months are spent marking time — or building up one's organisation, or trying to look and sound presidential. Then the summer doldrums end with the televised national conventions, from which the candidates emerge swathed in balloons, smiles and red, white and blue bunting. And only then starts the intense home stretch — nine weeks of speeches, rallies, debates, misleading television advertising and malicious assaults, culminating in Election Day, the first Tuesday in November, when the whole blessed enterprise comes to an end and Americans vote for the man who will rule them and represent them to the world for the next four years. Technically, even Election Day doesn't mark the end of the process. The victor is only certified when the Electoral College meets in December, on the basis of the votes cast in each state in November, to formally elect the president of the United States. Indeed, in the unlikely but not impossible event of the electoral victor in November losing his life before the Electoral College meets, this body would be legally free to elect a president who wasn't even on the ballot on Election Day. But this is so far-fetched a possibility that it hasn't actually arisen in the 220 years that Americans have been electing a president. Every four years someone somewhere can be counted upon to say that the US presidential election is one in which the rest of the world ought to have a vote too, since its outcome has such an impact on the planet as a whole. But of course all the rest of us can do is to watch the process unfold from near or far. This is still, in my view, a huge asset for the United States. The fascination with the current US presidential election around the world is all the more valuable because it is not about the rest of the world: it is America deciding its future for itself. And yet, the quadrennial presidential exercise brings America a great deal of attention and, usually, admiration, for what it reveals about the US to the rest of the world. The election of a president Obama will, in particular, have a transformative effect on the rest of the planet. There are basically two stereotypes out there about America, one positive and one negative. The first is of America as Goliath, the big bully getting its way around the world through the ruthless and muscular pursuit of its national interests (interests usually seen as very narrowly conceived). The other is of America as the Land of Dreams, the Land of Hope and Opportunity, where anybody can be anything, where anyone can earn anything, and anyone can transform their lives in ways their parents could never have imagined. Ever since 9/11, the world has only seen the first stereotype; at least that's the one that has been reinforced in people's imaginations around the world by the Iraq invasion, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, torture, rendition, Blackwater's killings of Iraqi civilians, and so on. The election of a black 46-year-old first-term Senator, the son of an African immigrant, one bearing a Muslim name and who has lived in the Third World, would instantly dispel that stereotype and reinforce the second. Because he would be the living embodiment of the miraculous truth of the second stereotype, it would make America once more, in the world's eyes, the shining beacon of light upon a hill that Ronald Reagan spoke of, a country unlike any other. That doesn't mean that those who currently dislike American policies will suddenly find Washington more congenial. Despite the novelty of having a black man in the White House, there will be a certain continuity of domestic and foreign policies, and the machinery of government will for the most part be operated by people who have done it before. But the symbolic value of a president Obama will be incalculable. On the other hand, a defeat for Obama in what is widely seen as a Democratic year will lead a lot of people of colour around the world to see Americans as more fundamentally racist than they pretend to be. For America's sake, i hope it doesn't work out that way.