In their age, experience, race, faith in the power of government and views of a complex world, Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain offer American voters one of the sharpest contrasts in candidates for the presidency in modern times, at least on a par with the Johnson-Goldwater and Reagan-Mondale elections.
The 2008 presidential campaign, without an incumbent president or vice president in the race, will play out against a backdrop of deep restiveness, polling shows, with the public overwhelmingly dismayed about the direction the nation is taking.
The public is clamoring for change, experts say. And both Obama, the Democratic junior senator from Illinois, and McCain, the Republican senior senator from Arizona, will try to capitalize on that appetite for a new course in American government.
Yet while these two contenders are in some ways courting the same voters — independent swing voters who hold no allegiance to either party — they could hardly be more different. Both Obama and McCain are promising change, and the race may come down simply to whom voters believe and trust.
“I can’t think of anything in our era that comes close to this,” said Andrew Kohut, president of the Washington-based Pew Research Center. “They will bring people back to the fundamentals that ‘I am choosing a person. I am not choosing a party or a philosophy’ … It really comes down to the way that independent voters who are the least ideological look at these candidates and say, ‘Which agent of change am I most confident in?'”
The contrast is stark:
*Obama is a generation younger. If elected president, at age 47 he would be surpassed in youth only by Bill Clinton, 46 at his election; John Kennedy, 43; and Theodore Roosevelt, at 42 the youngest person ever to become president, having taken office with the assassination of William McKinley in 1901. McCain, in contrast, would be the oldest president ever elected to a first term. He will be 72 in November, older than Ronald Reagan, who won in 1980 at age 69.
*Obama is a first-term senator and relative newcomer on the stage of foreign affairs; McCain a fourth-termer who has taken many congressional tours abroad.
*Obama, born of a Kenyan father and American mother, would be the first African-American in the White House. McCain, from a long line of Scottish Presbyterians, is a third-generation graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, with ancestors who served in the Confederacy and one who served on the staff of Gen. George Washington.
*McCain is a military veteran, with 22 years in the Navy, including 5 1/2 as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. He is the son and grandson of admirals. Obama was a child during the Vietnam War and has never served in the military.
*When it comes to policy, Obama opposed the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq from the start, before his election to the Senate in 2004. McCain, while critical of the Bush administration’s conduct of the war in its early stages, voted for the authorization of military force and supports President George W. Bush’s strategy today.
*Obama is open to negotiation with recalcitrant world leaders, such as the president of Iran, who is pursuing the enrichment of uranium contrary to U.S. insistence that he stop. McCain holds a hard line against negotiation, instead insisting that the U.S. financially squeeze Iran.
*Obama wants to offer universal health care for Americans and is willing to raise taxes on the wealthiest citizens to help pay for a costly new program. McCain, who voted against prescription drug benefits for the elderly under Medicare, warns against the expansion of government health care and vows to avert new taxes.
As citizens of the world, they share an awareness of foreign shores: Obama was born in Hawaii and raised for a time in Indonesia. McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone, and his family, he has written, was “rooted not in a location, but in the culture of the Navy.”
Historic contrasts
Past elections have certainly presented differences as well. George H.W. Bush’s “read my lips” pledge of no new taxes, later broken, contrasted with Clinton’s vision of an expanding social safety net. Jimmy Carter’s insurgent candidacy confronted institutional Washington’s Gerald Ford. The purist conservatism of Barry Goldwater was on a collision course with Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society.” John Kennedy’s charisma ran up against Richard Nixon’s made-for-theater persona in a new age of telegenic appeal.
But arguably no race in modern times has presented a contrast as broad as that of the personal profiles of Obama and McCain, combined with their views on government at home and America’s involvement in a treacherous world.
McCain, vowing to restrain government spending, wants to extend the Bush tax cuts. Obama, proposing new spending for health care, wants to boost taxes on wealthier Americans. McCain pledges to prosecute the war in Iraq to a conclusive victory. Obama promises to bring troops home in 16 months.
“These two individuals represent about as stark a choice as we’ve ever had in American politics,” said Darrell West, professor of political science at Brown University. “Voters are going to get what Barry Goldwater long ago promised — ‘a choice instead of an echo.'”
He added, “The biggest differences are age, race and philosophy … Those are things that translate into different perspectives on public policy.”
Even their campaign styles seem to come from different worlds. Obama electrifies large arenas, while McCain is far more comfortable in smaller gatherings. Possibly because of this, McCain on Wednesday challenged Obama to a series of 10 town hall-style campaign debates.
“What we haven’t seen are these two candidates face-to-face with one another,” said David Lanoue, chairman of the political science department at the University of Alabama and author of “From Camelot to the Teflon President.” “Clearly, Obama is a very inspiring, eloquent speaker. … He is best behind a podium with a prepared speech. McCain is best in a person-to-person situation with no prepared remarks.”
“I think there is another dimension, and that is whether Barack Obama is seen as an elitist candidate,” said Herb Asher, professor of political science at Ohio State University. “McCain will try to wrap himself in the mantle of change and present Obama as the agent of the wrong kind of change. … It’s really going to be a chance for Barack Obama to fill in the rest of his biography.”
Discontent unites
The choice arrives at a time when Americans are unified in one thing: discontent.
Seven in 10 Americans are dissatisfied with the state of the nation, the latest Pew Center survey indicates, and 27 percent of those surveyed in mid-May voiced approval of the job Bush is doing (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text).
“The fundamentals are certainly going in a Democratic direction,” Pew’s Kohut said. “But there are rather sharp sets of really well-defined positives and negatives for each of these candidates, which makes it a much closer race.”
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mdsilva@tribune.com
