As it turns out, there is a way to render the most vocal Obamamanic speechless: Ask if the possibility – however slight, however remote – of their candidate losing is something that may have ever, for the briefest moment, crossed their mind.
“I hadn’t even thought about it,” says Brooklynite Jeff Strabone, who has gone so far as to adopt Obama’s middle name, Hussein, as his own. (“I thought, ‘Let’s make it an asset – like, “I am Spartacus!’ “). Strabone was planning to keep the Hussein through election day, but if Obama loses, “I may have to keep it a little longer.” Also, he would cry: “That’s what I’ll do. It would mean the country wants to go backwards, towards fear, anti-intellectualism. I don’t know . . . I don’t even want to think about it.” “It’s funny – I hadn’t even thought about it once,” says Jake Abraham, who has produced events for the Obama campaign. “It’s totally possible – we’re often in the situation where the Democrat loses. George Bush was a terrible, terrible president. But Karl Rove was very sly, and he put together a very mannered strategy that worked. There are plenty of uninformed voters out there, and all you have to do is scare them.” It may not take much. According to a recent Newsweek poll, those white voters most reluctant to vote for a black man are, shockingly, in the 18-29 age group.
“I would imagine that those voters are, for the most part, uneducated,” says Michael Fauntroy, author of “Republicans and the Black Vote.” Fauntroy subscribes to the conventional wisdom that Obama’s only two obstacles are inexperience and race, with only one of those issues up for discussion. “The media doesn’t want to talk about race because you could inflame the issue,” he says. “The GOP doesn’t want to have this discussion either. No one wants to have it.” Fauntroy believes that the Bradley effect, by definition unquantifiable, may be responsible for Obama’s inability to break open a wider lead against McCain in the polls.
“I think the election is Obama’s to lose,” he says. “Some people feel he slayed the most important dragon you could slay, and that’s Hillary Clinton. So if he loses, the millions of people who have always felt that their vote doesn’t matter, that have been energized by Obama – they will be out of the process for decades, I think. Because they will feel that the process doesn’t work.” On the critical issues driving this election – the economy, the Iraq war, health care – more registered voters agree with Obama. He also possesses those rare, esoteric qualities that tend to be underestimated and tend to predict victory: charisma and optimism.
“When you ask most Americans who the best American presidents were, they say, ‘Washington, Lincoln, FDR’ – and then they add Kennedy and Reagan,” says presidential historian Robert Dallek. As with Obama, “those two gave the country hope and inspired so many people – JFK with the New Frontier and Reagan with Morning in America. Obama has had this meteoric rise because he has been able to capture people’s desire for hope.” As with the 1932 election – when anti-Hoover, anti-GOP sentiment was at its apex – “this election is about George W. Bush,” says Dallek (who predicts an Obama victory by the slimmest of margins). “It’s a repudiation of this presidency, the war, the state of the economy.” But curiously, a recent Fox poll showed that among registered voters, McCain and Obama were nearly tied – yet 51% of those same voters expect Obama to win the presidency. That perception gap between the number of people who will vote for him versus the number of people expected to vote for him could lead to a disappointing November. “If Obama loses, it will deepen the cynicism and frustration of Democrats in general and particularly his supporters,” Dallek says. “And I think there will be a feeling that race sunk him.” Fauntroy agrees. Though he, too, thinks an Obama defeat unlikely, he fears it would crush the black community. “The African-American voters I know have so much emotionally invested with Obama; there are so many disaffected voters who have put their hopes and dreams on him,” he says. “It would confirm the suspicions that so many African-Americans have, that white America will not accept black people. Especially because Obama is the least threatening black man you could ever . . . If he can’t win, who can?”