Ads running on CNN at the moment are touting this week’s US Presidential election as an event that ‘will change the world’. But will it really? RAPHAEL VASSALLO looks at the implications of Tuesday’s vote on the Big Blue Marble

There is a fleeting sense of panic in the Democrat campaign as I sit down to write this article. It seems that Barack Obama has just slipped by one percent in CNN’s “poll of polls”, while his rival John McCain has clawed back a precious point. Unsurprisingly, the percentage of undecided voters has dwindled accordingly.
So it’s Obama 49, McCain 46, with less than a week to go. This, mind you, was the latest poll sampling held before the half-hour “infomercial” that blitzed American households on Wednesday evening. Even without the advantage his campaign team hope to derive from that expensive nationwide TV exposure – viewed by over 30 million, we learnt the following day – Barack Obama would still need the electoral equivalent of spontaneous human combustion to lose his runaway advantage.
But American elections are not always decided by national majorities, as the notorious 2000 debacle clearly illustrated. To win on Tuesday, Obama must not only cling to his lead, but also wrest from Republican rule one or more of a number of pivotal swing states: Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia or Florida, in order of likelihood.
Regardless of what the polls project, and even of the fact that “early voting” appears to overwhelmingly favour the 47-year-old Afro-American senator from Illinois, it will clearly still be a nail-biting race to the very finish.

Ready, steady...change!
So far, the expectations of millions of ordinary Americans from this particular election – both Democrats and Republicans, it must be said – can be summed up in a single word: change.
In this at least, they are likely to be accommodated. Harry Vassallo, former chairman of the Maltese Greens, is among those who believe that whoever wins the election will find himself an agent of change almost by default: if nothing else, simply because “he will not be George W. Bush”. But his optimism ends there.
“The policies of the past eight years – for example, taking unilateral action, or the practice of certifying countries as ‘rogue states’, and then heating up global animosity against them – have already been dumped by America,” he explains. “If the incoming president manages to make a return to the pre-Bush status quo, it would already be a revolution. But personally, I don’t think he will be able to do even that...”
Vassallo’s scepticism stems from the fact that neither Obama nor McCain would be immune to the insurmountable constraints of an unfolding financial crisis, over which they are likely to have little control.
“Whoever wins will have to manage a major economic cultural earthquake unlike any that America has experienced before: a new landscape in which major corporations are bailed out by public money, and so on. From this point of view the most we can realistically hope for is a change in the way business is done.”
But Harry Vassallo admits that his own expectation of change, no matter how modest, is likely to have an enormous impact on the world at large.
“Culturally, the influence of America on the rest of the world is still huge, even if its economic clout may change with the global economic balance,” he points out.
As for personal predictions, Vassallo is quietly hoping for a return to an all-but forgotten age of American liberalism... a development most would agree only one of the two candidates can truly deliver.
“The best thing that can happen right now is a re-emergence of the America we once knew, and that has been swamped completely by the policies of the past eight years,” Vassallo claims. “The image America has projected of itself under George Bush is completely alien to the country I once knew, and which I know still exists on account of my American friends and acquaintances. If moderate, Middle America takes the upper hand once more, it would good enough a change as far as I am concerned.”

‘Spaceship Earth’
Harry Vassallo is not the only local pundit to take the “change” motif with a pinch of salt. Mark Anthony Falzon, a lecturer in sociology at the University of Malta, dismisses CNN’s ‘world-changing’ election slogan as an example of “globalist babble”.
“It all depends on which world we’re talking about,” he says pointedly. “Take 9/11 for instance, widely touted as ‘the day the world changed’. Of course some parts of the world experienced changes following the attacks, but many others were not really affected. The image of ‘spaceship earth’, with the US President at the controls, is simplistic at best, and really just a sensationalist mantra.”
Having said that, Dr Falzon makes no secret of his own preference for George Bush’s successor: “I haven’t been losing sleep over it, but I suppose I’d like Obama to win.”
Foremost among his reasons is the Iraq war, but with an important qualification.
“I don’t think intervention is necessarily wrong; in fact I think it’s a duty to combat tyranny, by diplomatic and other means. Tyrants should not be allowed to hide behind national sovereignty. However, I don’t think these ‘other means’ should include armed conflict, except as a very last resort (as was the case in Afghanistan, in which case I think the war was/is justified). In sum, I think Iraq was an unjustified war. McCain voted in favour and Obama against, and that to me is reason enough to prefer Obama.”
Elsewhere, however, Falzon sees more common ground than differences between the two candidates.
“On immigration, the fact that both candidates support the building of a fence along the US-Mexico border doesn’t give me much hope. Invariably, the famous walls and fences of history have always looked stupid in retrospect,” he points out. “And on resource-use and pollution, both McCain and Obama seem to think that the US is at present not doing enough, and that’s encouraging. I think Obama’s targets for cutting down greenhouse emissions are too optimistic, though. And his ‘change’ rhetoric also strikes me as hot air.”

Race, gender, Age
Even if all this talk of ‘change’ proves illusory, few would deny that the current presidential campaign itself has marked a transformation in the way America views itself.
The first preconceived notion to bite the dust was the age-old stereotype of the US presidency as quintessential preserve of the ‘White Anglo-Saxon Protestant’ business elite: or as filmmaker Michael Moore so unflatteringly described them, “Stupid White Men”.
Even if Obama fails to secure the White House on Tuesday, his successful campaign earlier this year against the Clintons (no less) will have been enough to shatter the illusion of race as an unbreakable glass ceiling in American politics.
And yet, it was only a few years ago that science fiction movies such as ‘The Fifth Element’ and ‘Deep Impact’ cast Afro-Americans in the role of US president: a flight of fancy deemed by contemporary critics to be as implausible as Bruce Willis’ space-age planet-saving antics.
The selfsame protracted Obama/Clinton duel also exploded another demographic myth, emphatically proving to the world that the USA is more than ready to elect its first female President... a fact also implicit in John McCain’s controversial choice of running mate, Alaska governor Sarah Palin.
But a few American myths live on in spite of everything. If the Democrat nomination contest pitted race against gender, the Republicans faced a similar internal dissonance, although this time the tandem was age/religion.
In the end it was 72-year-old Vietnam vet John McCain who pulled off a remarkable comeback, crossing the finish line ahead of Rudy Giuliani, Mick Huckabee and other, much younger hopefuls... including Mitt Romney: well-groomed, charismatic and immensely popular, but hampered by what many considered to be an insurmountable obstacle to the Oval Office: he was (and still is) a Mormon.
Religious discrimination reared its head in other aspects of the campaign, too. Obama himself was variously branded a “Muslim”, in spite of repeatedly professing to be a Christian... and one Democrat candidate for Congress had to defend herself from accusations of “godlessness”, on account of her presumed association with a well-known atheist organisation.
So while race, gender and age are clearly no longer issues in the Land of the Free, it seems that the nation founded by self-avowed atheists such as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and Tom Paine would still blanch at the prospect of a secularist President.

Moral morass
This sentiment is shared elsewhere in the world, including the unlikeliest of places. Dr Adrian Vassallo, an MP for the traditionally left-wing Malta Labour Party, openly supports right-wing candidate Senator John McCain. His reason?
“Obviously, because he is conservative. Obama is too liberal for my liking...”
In a sense, this show of support cuts across more than just traditional party lines; it goes right to the heart of what many feel to be the issue most at stake in these elections: America’s “lost” moral direction.
Contrary to popular belief about the United States – a belief which is considerably more popular in Europe than America itself – whacky religious issues such as creationism, Intelligent Design and the teaching of evolution in State schools hardly featured at all in this particular election.
There was admittedly a knee-jerk reaction to the choice of Sarah Palin as McCain’s running mate, with celebrities such as Hollywood actor Matt Damon insisting that Palin could not be trusted with the nuclear codes because she believed “that dinosaurs were around with people 6,000 years ago.”
And certainly, there are many dinosaurs still lurking on the lunatic fringe of the American Bible Belt. But they were all curiously quiet on the election front, despite the fact that the Democrats have fielded arguably their most liberal candidate ever. Not even the polemical abortion issue left much of a dent, in a campaign all but totally dominated by the spiralling global economic crisis.
And yet, abortion is likely to feature among the key decisions taken during the next President’s first term of office, when as many as three Supreme Court judges are expected to retire: creating “excellent vacancies” in a legal institution capable of dictating instantaneous Constitutional law.
Replacing the incumbent conservatives with pro-choice judges, as Obama has hinted he would do if elected, could effectively change the composition of the Supreme Court for the foreseeable future, derailing any plans for a reversal of “Roe versus Wade” – the 1973 ruling which legalised abortion in the USA as a fundamental right for women.
The choice of Supreme Court judges is therefore of paramount importance in a country still torn by that viscerally divisive ruling – a fact which may explain the Republican “revolt” against President George W. Bush, when he took the unprecedented step of nominating his own family attorney, Harriet Myers, to replace pro-choice judge Sandra Day O’ Connor in 2005.
But with the exception of a passing allusion during one of the three televised Presidential debates, the potentially explosive issue was hardly touched upon at all; and nowhere was its absence more conspicuously felt than on the second debate, conducted on the “Town Hall” format, in which questions were left exclusively to a number of hand-picked undecided voters.
Apart from the occasional query about foreign policy, voters’ concerns focused almost exclusively on the candidates’ respective proposals for the economy: a sentiment acknowledged by Adrian Vassallo, when qualifying his support for McCain.
“The main issues (in the US election) are obviously the state of the economy and foreign policy, although the latter has now lost some of its importance.”
While admitting that this will most likely play into the Illinois senator’s hands, Vassallo still believes that “the world will change for the better if McCain becomes President.”
“I am not saying that it will not if Obama will get elected instead, as he probably will... but I believe McCain is better suited to tackle the upsurge in terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism, Iraq and Afghanistan; the problems still persisting in the Middle East and Iran; as well as current tactics being deployed by Russia.”

Symbolic overtones
Malta’s former foreign minister, Michael Frendo, concurs with his erstwhile parliamentary rival in that foreign policy remains a factor, even if overshadowed by the credit crunch.
“Financial crisis notwithstanding, the political, economic and military power of the United States of America remains a determining factor globally. So CNN’s claim that the election ‘will change the world’ is not altogether out of place,” he explains.
In this respect, Frendo sees change as a likelier prospect with an Obama victory... “...also because this would be a watershed in the political history of the US, while the election of McCain would have more elements of continuity.”
But echoing both Mark Anthony Falzon and Harry Vassallo, Michael Frendo is reluctant to be seduced by the “transformational” rhetoric, espoused even by Republic heavyweights such as former Secretary of State, Colin Powell.
“The proof of the pudding will be in the eating of course: we might get the opposite of what is being projected for electoral purposes; or, at least, not quite the same thing we might expect. Obama may want to prove that he is a tough cookie and not just a liberal; while McCain may want to prove that he is not such a warrior, but can also be a diplomat pursuing softer power.”
Frendo’s own choice of President remains his own jealously guarded secret, but he leaves little to the imagination when it comes to his preferred style of Presidential behaviour.
“From where I sit, I would like to see a strong US making fuller use of diplomacy and soft power, together with the EU, in a relationship which is based on equality, mutual respect, multilateralism and the international rule of law, and which serves as the foundation for concerted diplomatic action on issues which need urgently to be addressed for the sake of stability, peace and justice in the world.”
Having said that, if the choice were indeed up to the rest of the world, and not America at all, there would be little doubt which of the above views would find themselves in the minority.
Dr Isabelle Calleja, a lecturer in international relations at the University of Malta, has followed the issue from an original perspective: that of the global response to America’s otherwise national election. Citing an independent poll run by three individuals from Iceland – taken from a sample of over 600, 000 respondents the world over, including Malta – Calleja discerns “overwhelming support for Obama.”
“To be exact, 87% favour the Democratic candidate... with Malta alone scoring slightly higher, at 88%”, she explains. “On the international scene, Obama is undoubtedly seen as the candidate best placed to restore America’s international reputation: now best characterised by ‘American justice’ at Guantanamo Bay. This vision has been fuelled by his preparedness to practice a politics of discussion and debate, for instance with Iran, and his politically correct green politics that talks of reducing green house gas emissions by 80% by 2050.”
However, Calleja points out that these endeavours take second place in the context of what the election of Obama to the White House would signify to the world.
“A black American, of recent settlement and nondescript origins, is a symbol of hope that a new America is in the making, one that has returned to its roots and is attempting to resuscitate the American dream. An America that will once again draw on core values of justice, equality and democracy that will give substance to its claims to spread economic and political freedoms globally.”
Is any of this possible? We will find out soon enough. One thing, however, is certain not to change at all. No matter who is sworn in as 44th President of the US in January, the world he will have to deal with will still remain that round, blue and vastly imperfect planet that some 6.9 billion of us call home.

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