Whoever said that elections are predictable should head out to Alaska. The run-up to the US presidential election already has a plot that would put any Bollywood scriptwater in the shade. The issues and personalities have changed almost week to week, and the impossible has already happened thrice. First, an African-American is one of the two presidential candidates. Second, the woman in this election was supposed to be Hillary Clinton, but isn’t. And third, the new star of the show is an unknown woman from Wassila. Amazingly, her life-story dredges up the old wisecrack that when Americans are not praying, they are shooting (animals in this case, people in so many others), or indulging in teenage sex. So who wants to hear about Iraq, or the economy, or global warming, or George W Bush’s record, when you have on the ticket a hockey mom who is a pit bull disguised with lipstick? If this election is about issues, then it is strange to have John McCain saying he does not understand much economics, and Sarah Palin saying she has not thought much about Iraq, except that it is God’s war. You also have a Republican vice-presidential candidate who disagrees with the presidential nominee on several issues, including global warming — which she doesn’t think is man-made.
So, it’s the personality, stupid. John McCain as the war hero, with five years as a Vietnam PoW, and as the party maverick; a former beauty queen who is the most macho of the four candidates, whose husband has been campaigning for Alaska to secede from the US; Barak Obama, of course, as the first Black candidate with the soaring oratory. And the best-known thing about a veteran Joe Biden, after 36 years in the Senate, is that he takes the train home from Washington DC to Delaware every night. It is about spin, too, of course. Initially, the choice was supposed to be between “change” and “experience”. But Barak Obama is increasingly painted as an old-style liberal, and John McCain can no longer tout experience after his last-minute, third choice as vice-president (the party brass vetoed the first two) pitchforked Sarah Palin onto centre-stage. Ms Palin has spun her life-story into a battle against pork-barrel politics, but her real record seems to be pro-pork.
To add to the drama, Mr Obama’s lead in the polls has vanished. Unless there are more twists and turns in the eight weeks of campaigning that remain, this now promises to be another election that goes down to the wire, to be decided by handfuls of voters in the swing states. Neither candidate has so far been able to come up with the defining phrase or sentence that will crystallise what this election is about. Meanwhile, for what it is worth, it must be said that Mr Obama seems to have the better set of policies on health care and energy, and Obama-Biden may be less risky at the helm of the world’s sole superpower than having two mavericks as president and vice-president. Some observers argue that Mr McCain will be better for India than Mr Obama (who has spoken out against outsourcing, and moved some negative amendments in the Senate when it came to the nuclear deal), but no American president will ignore the combined power of the NRI lobby in the US, the attractions of the Indian market for US corporations, and the alignments in international geo-politics.