The election of Barack Obama is one of the most dramatic political events in recent history. It remains to be seen how well he does in office. But he has started with immense goodwill both at home and overseas. Opinion polls suggested that if Australians had been able to vote last November, at least 70 per cent would have voted for him.

This review article looks at some of the new books on him or his times. An Obama publishing industry is quickly developing.

Obama: The Person

Obama is young, black, has Hussein as a middle name and comes from a broken family of limited means. If such a person could make it to the White House, then it is still possible for any young American to aspire to go from the "log cabin to the White House". His rise is a reaffirmation of the traditional American values of hard work and good education.

He flashed onto the American political less than five years ago. His meteoric rise is in itself an indication of the difference between US politics and Australian politics (where candidates for high office are expected to put in years of hard tedious work at the lower levels).

His road to the White House began with a single electrifying speech. He was asked to speak at the 2004 Democratic Party nominating convention. John Kerry was being selected to run against President George W Bush (who was running for a second time).

The convention organizers wanted a speaker who could rally the troops without being too personally negative against Bush himself. The task of this convention set piece has always been to whip up enthusiasm for the main speech which is given next by the candidate (in this case Kerry). It was to pave the way for the candidate's own speech, which hopefully would also be memorable - and get plenty of media coverage.

Obama was vaguely known to organizers as a good speaker; he was black (which showed the Democratic Party's inclusive quality); and he was from a mid-west state (and so not the elite north-eastern states, like Kerry's). They took a risk and invited Obama, rather than go to one of the party established grandees.

In fact, Obama's speech was more memorable than Kerry's acceptance own speech. Management consultant Shel Leanne has written about the speech in great detail and she has shown how Obama taught himself to be a skilled speaker. There is nothing accidental about his style. Americans are said to be more scared of making speeches in public than flying. Her book reaffirms the value of learning how to speak well - this is good advice for Australian parents to encourage children to take up debating at school.

I was talking to someone a few months ago who was at the 2004 convention. He said that in the vast auditorium many local conversations were taking place as people chatted during the speeches coming from the distant platform. But as Obama spoke, a wave of silence ran out from around the platform as people halted their chatting, turned their heads towards the platform and became mesmerized by what was happening. It was an electrifying moment - even for a jaded political observer. There was a feeling that history was being made.

Suddenly Democratic Party officials were talking about Obama as a potential presidential candidate. Few however predicted his challenge to come so quickly. With the defeat of Kerry in November 2004, it was assumed that Senator Hillary Clinton would be the obvious candidate in November 2008.

But Obama has had a (short) lifetime of being under-estimated. He was born in Hawaii to an 18 year old white woman from Kansas and an African exchange student in his early 20s who abandoned his family not long after Barack's birth. Obama was raised in Hawaii and Indonesia, sometimes by his anthropologist mother and sometimes by his maternal grandparents in Kansas. It was not, at first sight, a promising start to life.

But his family were supportive and he had a determination to succeed. As with Bill Clinton he was a bright student who worked hard and overcame initial poverty (indeed these two would be rivals to the title of being the most formally intelligent person ever to be US president).

As his educationally gifted wife Michelle likes to point out: he was the top of the top of the top. He got into Harvard Law School (the US's best law school), then he got elected to the board to of the law school journal and then he got elected as editor. This was not the juvenile student politics that we see in Australia - Harvard law School students expect almost by right to end up on the Supreme Court or Congress. He was competing against the best. His election as the first black editor gave him his first taste of national publicity.

Bill Clinton - poor white trash from the South - married into wealth and style. Liza Mundy's biography of Michelle Obama shows that Obama married into a stable black family - but still one with far less wealth and status than Hillary's.

Michelle Robinson comes from Chicago, which is the de facto black American capital. Obama gravitated towards Chicago both looking for work as a young lawyer just out of Harvard and as the basis of black political power. He knew from an early age that he wanted to get into politics of some sort. Community organizing in Chicago gave him the training ground.

Chicago is a Democratic city with a long history of political corruption. The Republican state of Illinois publishes its election figures only after the usually Democratic-controlled city of Chicago publishes it own. There are allegations that Democratic Party bosses wait to see how the Republican candidates are doing elsewhere in the state of Illinois and then stuff the ballot boxes with the required number of winning votes. The dead take a while to get to the polling booth. Democratic Party members like to joke that they want to be buried in Chicago so that "I can remain politically active after I die".

Obama had to work his way up through this turmoil. He did not have a smooth rise in Chicago politics.

The Robinson family was an unusual black one in that it stayed together (most black kids are raised by single mothers). None of them ended up in prison (there are more young black males in prison than in higher education). Her father, although long stricken with MS, worked in the council sanitation department for as long as his health permitted. Obama knows a lot about the defects of the US health system.

There was no inherited Obama/ Robinson wealth. The Obamas have only in the last few years finished paying off their university education debts. For some years, she earned more than her politician husband because she was a company director. It was only when he turned to writing books that he started to earn more than she did.

Obama and the Reinvention of Lyndon Johnson

What Barack Obama's parents did was illegal in some US states when he was born in Hawaii. It is perhaps hard to imagine that "mixed" marriages were still illegal in some American states when he was born. His election has shone a fresh light on one of the most reviled politicians in US history.

100 years - almost to the day - before Obama was elected to the presidency, Lyndon Johnson was born in Texas, in the Old South. He rose up through the Democratic Party and became Vice President for John Kennedy (a Catholic from an elite north-eastern state). He "balanced" the November 1960 ticket (though his blatant crudeness horrified Kennedy's intellectual friends).

Following Kennedy's assassination in Texas in November 1963, Johnson became President. He expanded Kennedy's military commitment in Vietnam (and recruited Australian troops for the campaign). The US was eventually defeated there in 1975. President Johnson (1963-8) was one of the most hated politicians in US history because of the Vietnam War.

Now Johnson is being reinvented as one of the great "transformative" presidents. Political commentators Sidney Blumenthal and Robert Kuttner have set out - albeit via different routes - the new political landscape.

The Republican Party (often called "GOP": Grand Old Party) was the first of the modern US political parties. The first successful GOP leader was Abraham Lincoln in 1860. He is seen as a "transformative" president because he took the US through its Civil War (which resulted in more American deaths than any other American military campaign) and he freed the slaves. The winning North was then the industrial heartland of the developing US and so the GOP was based in the powerful part of the country and boasted of its links with the legendary Lincoln.

The Republican Party dominated politics until 1932 and the Great Depression. Franklin Roosevelt - for the reinvigorated Democratic Party - became the next "transformative" president - by lifting the US out of the Great Depression then leading the US to victory in World War II. The Democratic Party (especially the conservatives in the South) dominated politics 1932-68.

The next big GOP opportunity came in 1965. As Johnson signed the 1965 Civil Rights Act - which made Obama's later legal and political career possible - so he said privately "we (in the Democratic Party) have now lost the South for a generation". How right he was.

The GOP under Richard Nixon in 1968 argued that although the GOP was the party of Lincoln it was not the party of the Civil Rights legislation. The GOP 1968-2008 was dominated by Southern Republicans, with support from the Western states and the conservative Catholic sidewalks of New York.

The winning GOP formula in 2000 and 2004 was "God, gays and guns" - we believe in God, hate gays and think everyone should have access to guns. George W Bush was able to attract conservative Christians (who normally don't vote because politics is seen as sinful) and blue collar working class voters who love their guns. He was very successful as a political campaigner. But meanwhile the GOP has almost faded away in the North. His grandfather Prescott came from the North and now the GOP (let alone the Bush dynasty) have virtually np presence in the old home state of Connecticut. The GOP in 2008 is now based in the South, while the Democratic Party is bouncing back in most other states.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama mobilized a young generation of otherwise alienated voters. Voting is not compulsory in the US and traditionally more Americans vote in the "American Idol" TV programme than in presidential elections. But he made politics exciting for the young generation and he mobilized information technology for his campaign.

Meanwhile, Lyndon Johnson, who has been dead for three decades, is now undergoing a revival in his status and he is now seen - thanks to the Civil Rights legislation - as a "transforming president". Obama is a not a seed of the Civil Rights movement - he is a flower. Ironically one of Obama's biggest stumbles last year came with poor white traditional blue collar working class voters (a category of the population that he had had least exposure to). He complained about their love of guns and their small town reliance on religion.

A startling insight into the mentality of those people is provided by Joe Bageant. He grew up in a poor area of Virginia and left to make money in the big city. He returned to see his family's roots. Guns and God are very important to these people, where they feel insecure because of the declining economic opportunities. Obama alienated them at his peril. Obama's usually open and engaging style failed him. The GOP have been more successful in talking the language of these traditional Democratic Party working class supporters. They have done well in the "culture wars" with their focus on "God, gays and guns". Governor Sarah Palin was brought onto the November 2008 GOP ticket to balance the perceived weaknesses on these issues of Senator McCain. She galvanized the GOP campaign but could not reverse the voter slide towards "Obama-mania".

Obama and the Economic Crisis

President Obama has announced a withdrawal from Iraq and he is looking for a new strategy on Afghanistan. His main problem is therefore the economy. It was probably the economy that mostly damaged the GOP candidates in the November 2008 election and helped the Democratic Party landslide. His re-election chances in November 2012 will also probably be over-shadowed by the state of the economy.

But Obama has limited options and the future does not look all that promising. In fairness to George W Bush (2000-8), he too had limited options because the US's economic problems began well before 2000. One of the keys to the unemployment problem in the US is the steep and probably irreversible decline in the demand for unskilled labour - Joe Bageant's relatives. Factory and office mechanization and the export of menial jobs have reduced the economic opportunities of many ordinary blue collar Americans.

Two recent books set out the bad news. Political commentator Kevin Phillips first came to prominence over three decades ago when he foresaw an emerging Republican majority in US politics. That seemed a strange idea at the time (given how well the Democratic Party had been doing in US politics since 1932) but he was proved right.

Now he has produced a book on why the US economy is in trouble and he blames the "extreme greed, reckless leverage and sheer incompetence" of big business. He accuses politicians of being ill-informed or turning a blind eye to what was happening and he foreshadows even greater crises for the US in the years ahead. For example, he is worried about the decline in oil exploitation and that the world may be running out of it. He is pessimistic about the US's future. He does not offer policy recommendations. Instead he sees the imperial US heading towards a gradual decline just like imperial Britain in the early 20th century.

Robert Reich, formerly in the Clinton Administration and now back to university teaching, takes a slightly longer - but equally sombre - view of the US's economic situation. He argues that the US is in trouble now because the old conditions that worked so well in the post-war years of the 1950s no longer apply. The nature of business has changed with shareholders and consumers having more power over corporations and there being greater business options overseas.

Wal-Mart, for example, "aggregates" consumer power. In other words, this huge chain of stores can exert more bargaining leverage over suppliers than can a small store and it can force lower prices on local suppliers (or just go off-shore). Therefore, a blue collar person (say) in Joe Bageant's Virginia towns both benefits and loses from this new era of "aggregated" power. The person can buy more goods at lower prices than ever before - but as a worker they will need to compete against what a Chinese worker is willing to work for. Today's US workers earn less than they would have done in the 1950s.

Reich illustrates this dilemma with the price of a colour TV. Colour TVs were introduced in the US in the late 1950s and cost US$2,227. The price had been halved by 1967. By 2000 the price had dropped to US$175, making it affordable to virtually all American families - including over 90 per cent of families with incomes under the poverty line. (Reich doesn't mention this but I think that the US no longer makes colour TVs - hence part of the explanation of the low price: Asians are cheaper workers).

Reich is a good writer on this new era and he tries to create some recommendations. But none of them appeal to me very much. He hopes that citizens will get back involved in politics and push for reforms, such as reduced corporate funding of election campaigns, tougher penalties for crooked business people and greater regulation of business activities.

Obama's immediate challenge is to revive trust in the financial system and halt the slide towards a new Great Depression. But as Phillips and Reich both gloomily suggest, there are much deeper issues involved in terms of the US's long-term economic restructuring. These may have evolved anyway even without the current financial crisis, not least due to the remarkable revival in China and India and their competition for the US.

But trying to finish this article on an optimistic note, perhaps it could be argued that Obama's open and engaging style of leadership may encourage more alternative thinking and the creation of new ideas. His life story has displayed such qualities.

His election is itself a sign that the US can again reinvent itself. After all, the Old West tradition was that a person could head West and begin a new life. Reinvention is an old American tradition. Don't write off the US too soon.

Books Mentioned:

Joe Bageant Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War, Melbourne: Scribe, 2007

Sidney Blumenthal The Strange Death of Republican America: Chronicles of a Collapsing Party, New York: Union Square Press, 2008

Robert Kuttner Obama's Challenge: America's Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency, Melbourne: Scribe, 2009

Shel Leanne Say it Like Obama: The Power of Speaking with Purpose and Vision, Sydney: McGraw-Hill, 2008

Liza Mundy Michelle Obama: A Biography, Sydney: Simon & Schuster, 2008

Kevin Phillips Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism, Melbourne: Scribe, 2008

Robert Reich Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life, Melbourne: Scribe, 2008

Additional Commentary By Dr Keith Suter:

Can America Re-Invent Itself? From Investor Daily. 1st May 2009

W - The Movie. A Review by Dr Keith Suter

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