Comment

I spent the last month traveling through the US, on a trip that took me to both coasts, through Buffalo in upstate New York and New York City, then San Francisco, the Bay Area and Palo Alto. And Vote Obama stickers were the only ones I saw on the cars and windows of houses along the way. Admittedly, except for Buffalo, the others are Obama territory, though there hasn’t been any poll showing an absence of the Hillary vote in those cities. Obviously, Obama’s are the only supporters wearing their candidate on their sleeves.

Local media too, especially television, are Obama-fixated, though not to his advantage, since all the chatter is about Obama’s relationship with his firebrand pastor, thus putting the candidate on the back foot in the daily interviews. The political debate has begun to centre on race. Other issues, such as the state of the economy, health care, and energy and foreign policies have receded, says JoAnn Wypijewski, a political essayist who has written about the Democratic Party for two decades.

Bill Clinton introduced race into the campaign in South Carolina at a time when Hillary was sliding into oblivion. Clinton knew that calling Obama ‘young and inexperienced’ would be read racially as ‘boy’, says Wypijewski. No one points out that Bill was as young and as inexperienced at foreign policy when he was first elected president.

A crisis awaits the Democratic Party no matter who wins the Democratic nomination, believes Wypijewski. If the Clintons don’t quit the race, come the general election in November, Obama voters will be so annoyed at the relentless Clinton machine that they will not support Hillary. If Obama does manage to win the candidacy, the voter who is drawn to Hillary because of the awakening of racial reservations will stay away from Obama or vote McCain.

In the Bay area. my host was a woman in her thirties born in the US, who went to Berkeley, then Yale, worked in the health care industry, and is now a full-time mother. Her parents migrated from Maharashtra in the 1960s to the same area where she now lives with her husband, an Indian who frequently travels to Mumbai. As she drove me around Lafayette, she said she was going to vote for Hillary, as she felt Obama was too inexperienced to deal with an international crisis.

However, the best insight on the Democratic contenders came from Torontonians in the form of the ‘world’s first metaphysical poll’. Metaphysi-calpoll.com, started by Sheila Heti, a Toronto-based novelist, invites people to post their dreams about Obama and Hillary.

According to the New Yorker, one week after the website became operational, Obama’s edge in the over-all dream count (38 to 30) was roughly equivalent to his lead in the latest Gallup poll.

The website hosts expert analyses of the dreams. Here is what Kelley Bulkeley, the author of American Dreamers: What Dreams Tell Us About The Political Psychology Of Conservatives, Liberals, And Everyone Else, has to say after studying the first 100 dreams: “People’s dreams of Hillary frequently show her as friendly and likeable, with an admirable willingness to help others. But compared to dreams of Barack Obama, the Hillary dreams are darker and more negative… The Barack dreams have some negative elements, too, but they have an almost equally high number of friendly interactions and many more happy emotions and lucky/magical events — the very qualities I’ve found in previous research to define ‘mystical’ dreams.”

I had met Heti and her American artist friend, Margaux Williamson, in Toronto before I left for the US. Williamson told me that she’d had a dream about Hillary and her buying Tupperware together, and Heti laughed and informed me that this was what had given her the idea of trawling the collective unconscious about this unique Democratic primary. Her website could have saved me the trip.

Email: r_ansari@dnaindia.net