The democratic nominee for president should be known in less than a month, after the February 5 “super Tuesday” primaries, which include votes in California and New York. It will likely be the junior senator from Illinois, Barack Obama. His decisive victory in Iowa removed the main objection to his candidacy: white America would not vote for an African-American, and therefore he could not win the presidency.

One wag called Iowa the whitest place (97 per cent) known other than the North Pole. Yet Obama won 38 per cent of the Iowa vote, against two tough opponents in Hillary Clinton, who has led the national race for months, and John Edwards, who has mounted a direct attack on corporate greed.

Should Obama go on to win the Democratic nomination, and the presidency, it will be because, in addition to his immense personal appeal, and undoubted ability on the hustings, he has best read and understood the current mood of the American electorate.

The reality is that conservatives have failed America. The candidate of change, Obama represents hope and a fresh departure. But there is more to his campaign. His is expressing, in a new way, the deep-seated American nationalism which has characterized the Republic from its beginning.

While this may prove to be cause for grave concern outside the U.S., for those who are thronging to Obama, it means a chance to feel good about America again.

Obama taught constitutional law in Chicago. He was editor of the Harvard Law Review. He will talk to middle America about restoring the constitution to its citizens.

For African-Americans to talk with family about voting for one of their own for president is a barely imaginable opportunity, a huge break with the past. For white America, to support Obama is to show you are above racism.

Were Obama to win office, become President Obama, it would make an important symbolic statement: the American dream is alive and well. What Obama gets that Edwards does not, is that it is nationalism, not liberalism, that represents the most appealing alternative to the failures not just of the conservative Bush-Cheney regime of the last eight years, but of the conservative ideology which has governed America since the election of Nixon in 1968.

When in the 1960s Lyndon Johnson signed civil rights legislation into law, over the opposition of conservative Southern Democrats, Johnson, a Texan, said that the Democratic party which had been a working coalition of Northern liberals and Southern conservatives, would lose its Southern base for a generation. He was right; it did, and the Democrats suffered as a party. Nixon’s Southern strategy captured the South for the Republicans.

The next step was to remake the Republican party into an ideological conservative machine. The old party of middle American, strongly influenced by anti-New Deal Wall Street financiers, but with an active liberal wing, became the political instrument of organized money (think tanks, corporate lobby groups, and wealthy individuals).After Gerald Ford pardoned the disgraced Nixon, he lost the White House to a moderate Southern conservative Democrat, Jimmy Carter. George Bush Sr. lost to another Southern moderate conservative Democrat Bill Clinton, after the wild card Ross Perot divided the right wing vote.

When Clinton left office, his administration had been running a succession of huge budget surpluses, and been paying down the national debt, like good conservatives under the influence of Wall Street. They had also handed the Senate and Congress to the Republicans.

Bush-Cheney have blown the budget, entrapped the U.S. in a Vietnam like quagmire in Iraq, and run roughshod over the American constitution in the absurd war against an abstract noun (terror).

In 2008, widening inequality, despair, drug use, fabulous wealth, and mortgage bankruptcy characterize American society. The war of the winners against everybody else, launched by the ideological conservatives, with the Republicans successfully pulling away a modest liberal safety net that protected the losers, has indeed created two Americas, as Edwards points out.

In his quest for office, rather than attack organized money and the ideological conservatives, Obama is reaching out, targeting in particular, the independent, and Republican voters he needs to win the presidency. In Iowa he polled strongly with both independents and Republicans, as well as out-doing Hillary with women voters, and capturing the youth vote.

Look closely at who is behind the Obama campaign, and you will find corporate money, and Wall Street operatives. The candidate has yet to detail what he plans to change, and define what policies he wants to bring forward. At this point he is simply doing what he can to gain support, to bring people together.

Nationalism is a potent political brew. Obama addresses the American people, who are not united, and who do not make up one nation, but do have a common citizenship that is deeply cherished.

He is the candidate who best expresses the deepest desires Americans have for their country. That is what voters look for in their president.

Duncan Cameron

Duncan Cameron

Born in Victoria B.C. in 1944, Duncan now lives in Vancouver. Following graduation from the University of Alberta he joined the Department of Finance (Ottawa) in 1966 and was financial advisor to the...