“Obama effect”
There is a growing concern that the “Obama effect” currently changing the face of “politics as usual” in the United States by propelling an increasingly large number of Americans, especially the forward looking, educated and young across the colour and racial divides, to cast their precious votes for their candidate of choice, who represents a quantum leap and paradigm shift towards a post-ethnic and post-modern national and international leadership, may turn out to be an euphoria and an “Audacity of Hope” that is intrinsically ephemeral. In retrospect, would this be construed simply as a “pleasure principle” that took the United States by the storm briefly, but was eventually caught up by the “reality principle” implicit in the “Bradley Effect,” also known as “Wilder effect” or “Dinkins Effect,” in which the margin of lead in the primary election enjoyed by yet another very promising African-American candidate was significantly wiped out in the final election because the White voters, who posed as independent and swing voters to conceal their racial affiliations during the primary reverted again to their true colours in the final election unabashedly? Could we bet on Obama's White half-ancestry to tip the balance in the final election to be able to declare that we had finally moved beyond the “phenotype” incontrovertibly entrenched in the US psyche for generations? What would be the impact of “Palin effect” designed by Karl Rove, a guru of the neo-cons, who was instrumental in effectively stage-managing and delivering the two successful presidential elections for GWB? How would we look back at the transformed Senator McCain, who morphed from a maverick on the bipartisan tightrope to a prisoner of partisan politics electrifying his otherwise disavowed base with fear mongering, false hopes, zingers and even cognitive dissonance without charm, eloquence, wit and salience. When the election would be lost and won and the dust settles should we return to H.L. Menken to put everything in perspective to quip, “Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage?”
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