FINANCIAL TIMES: There is not a scintilla of anything to be mistaken for modesty in Barack Obama’s pitch for the White House. Stripped of rhetorical ornament, it says vote for me because I am me. Mr Obama exults in the uniqueness of his personal story. To vote for him is to imagine a changed America. That explains why he defines the nature of the contest.
I have heard advisers to Hillary Clinton call this narcissism. They have a point, though it might be said also that most successful politicians like to catch their reflection in the pond. Anyway, Mr Obama is also right. An America that chose as its commander-in-chief a 46-year-old African-American with Hussein as his middle name would be a different place. There lies his political strength; and his weakness.
Of course, we must not get overly excited any longer about the freshman senator from Illinois. At the start of the week the media had elevated Mr Obama to the status of prophet over politician. To watch the television or to read the gush, here was Jack Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King rolled into one. And when last was a candidate for the Democratic nomination so lauded by conservative commentators?
All that is yesterday’s news. After New Hampshire, the “broken” Hillary Clinton no longer looks, well, broken. The wheels on the legendary Clinton political machine are turning again. The next batch of primaries, culminating in Super Tuesday on February 5, will lock out many of the undecideds and independents from whom Mr Obama drew strength in Iowa and New Hampshire.
So the pundits may begin to turn on him with symmetrical hyperbole. Mr Obama was the chosen one; he let them down. Defeat in New Hampshire was his mistake not theirs. He could yet discover the perilously short distance between a media verdict of visionary and one of vacuous. A reflection that defines the choice for US voters >>> By Philip Stephens
Mark Alexander (Paperback)
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