On the Road by James Naughtie

Author:James Naughtie [Naughtie, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

CHAPTER 7

TWO RACES OF A LIFETIME

In many places across America, in cities and small towns and hamlets, on planes and trains, in bars and diners, I can hardly count the conversations in which I was told that neither Barack Obama nor Donald Trump could be elected president of the United States. Eight years apart, the message was the same. Their campaigns, so it was said, were phantoms that would dissolve into nothing, because nature wouldn’t permit anything else. Each man was carrying a burden that was too heavy. I remember a locker room in a Minor League Baseball stadium in upstate New York, where the coach warned me politely and quietly in 2008 that I should not take seriously what his players told me about how they would vote. They might talk respectfully about Obama into a microphone, but at the polling place they would not vote for a black man, full stop. ‘Not yet,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Not yet. Believe me.’ Eight years later, just after a raucous Republican convention where Trump broke most of the rules of politics in a few wild days, one of the canniest political reporters in America looked me in the eye and said that I needed to understand one fact about the coming election. ‘Hillary Clinton could win this one from jail.’

Each of these two candidates, therefore, was entitled to regard election night as a revolutionary event, and they did. Although in the closing weeks of his campaign, Obama’s victory, unlike Trump’s, had begun to seem to most Americans the likeliest outcome, he was still able to portray it as a moment when people could ‘bend the arc of history’, as he put it in his victory speech just after midnight in Grant Park in Chicago. ‘If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.’ When Trump claimed his own victory in New York in 2016 he argued that his brash, unorthodox scramble to power, in which the shrewdness of his pollsters and tacticians had been disguised by his blustering style, lifted him above politics to a higher zone than his predecessor had ever occupied.

‘As I’ve said from the beginning, ours was not a campaign, but rather an incredible and great movement made up of millions of hard-working men and women who love their country.’

When he addressed ‘those who have chosen not to support me in the past, of which there were a few people . . .’ the crowd laughed and hooted on cue. He had seen them all off – his detractors, the Republican rivals who had called him coarse and crude, the people who questioned his business acumen and his wealth, and, stretching beyond them into the distance, the dismal crowd who loved Washington and its ways. Bringing these speeches to listeners

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