President Barack Obama was at his best during the last days of this US presidential campaign. I saw one speech where he tackled every perceived weaknesses of the current administration, with fiery passion, charisma and eloquence.
I saw him come out in rally after rally in the battleground states. And I knew Kamala Harris was cooked. You don’t work an asset like that unless you are in trouble.
And the more you brought out the Oprah Winfreys, the Michelle Obamas and the Clintons, the deeper trouble you were in. In the end, it was a significant whitewash with Trump getting 295 electoral college votes to Harris’s 226, with Nevada and Arizona yet to report. But Trump is leading in those as well and Harris has conceded.
So why? Why did Donald Trump, the oldest man to be elected President at 78, a convicted felon, real-estate and media show off with a bad history and a so-so record in office defeat a brilliant prosecutor almost 20 years his junior?
If you are a White, Anglo-Saxon protestant man, you enter the race with a significant advantage because historically, presidents are made of that. If you are woman whose father was a Jamaican Marxist professor at Stanford and your mother an Indian cancer researcher, you are a Jamaican in New York. You will struggle.
Between the two, Vice-President Harris appears the more qualified candidate, no question about it. But that is not enough. There are also the issues being canvassed and the constituency you are trying to represent.
The European conquest of North America was of uncommon brutality. Ninety per cent of the indigenous population of North American, about 55 million people, was slaughtered.
The ancient culture of the peoples of those lands was devastated, replaced in many cases with an alien way of life from another continent and many indigenous people have struggled to prosper in this changed context.
Resistance to candidates of colour
Google’s new-fangled bots found a chilling passage in Wikipedia: “According to geographers from University College London, the colonisation of the Americas by Europeans killed so many people…it resulted in climate change and global cooling”.
Conquest and subjugation is an awful, demeaning and, most times, fatal fate.
When you listen carefully to the American Right, its hatred for immigration and resistance to candidates of colour, is not entirely aggressive.
I suspect at least a small part of it is based on the subliminal fear of being invaded and meeting the same fate their ancestors meted out on those hapless indigenous peoples. This is not to excuse White supremacy, it is to try and understand a reality not just in America, but in many parts of the (developed) world.
Many of President-elect Trump’s supporters fear their homeland is in danger of being over-run by hordes of foreigners and of being “replaced”. To a foreigner’s eyes, the immigration system in the US looks totally, but deliberately, chaotic: Republicans don’t want it fixed because it gives them a winning issue around which to organise and Democrats see it swelling its ranks of supporters because migrants most times vote Democrat.
The three issues I saw mentioned most in TV interviews by voters were “border”, euphemism for anti-immigration, economy and abortion.
Trump scored big on the first two and the third was emotive but not enough to get Harris elected. The Democrats have so far nominated two women for the presidency and both have been beaten by Trump. It appears that being a woman is a problem in US presidential politics.
The other factor in this defeat is the fact that Harris was, in essence, nominated by one person – President Joe Biden.
The President, who was looking quite shaky and clearly couldn’t serve another term, was forced out by Democrat grandees, most likely Obama and House of Representatives Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi.
They expected Biden to drop out of the race and give the party an opportunity to nominate the most viable candidate in the circumstances.
He dropped out of the race but, as widely reported, served them a curved ball: he threw his weight behind Kamala, whom he must have known was not the most electable of candidates against Trump.
As a matter of fact, Biden, who had earlier promised to serve for only one term, changed his mind on the argument that only he could beat Trump.
The world is on fire. The Middle East appears to be a slow-burn World War Three trigger. Russia is bogged down in a war with Ukraine that it can’t seem to win, and in perpetual danger of provoking a shooting war with NATO.
In Asia, China’s provocation of Taiwan continues and North Korea threatens South Korea and Japan routinely. It must have appeared to many that the hands of a man who has done it before might be steadier on the wheel.
Mr Mathiu, a media consultant at Steward-Africa, is a former Editor-in-Chief of Nation Media Group. [email protected] .
