Barack Obama is not inspiring a new type of politics and may struggle against John McCain, said Hillary Clinton's advisor Sidney Blumenthal at a Fabian event.

“Obama does not represent the so called ‘new politics.’  It’s a model that goes back 35 years to George McGovern and has never worked in the Democratic Party.”

“The problem that Democratic Party has faced in winning elections is the defection and alienation of working-class voters – the Reagan Democrats.  Clinton has won these.  Obama may not.”  

He painted Obama’s success in the red state caucuses as less significant that Clinton’s victories in the swing state primaries, an argument that he feels should have been decisive with super-delegates.

“Super-delegates must make decisions about the institutional future of the party and what’s best for electability and victory.”

He warned that “the history of primaries is that states you lose in primaries, you lose in the general.”

He defended Senator Clinton against charges of exploiting racial divisions, declaring them “false charges” that have been cooked up by the Obama camp “to incite exactly this feeling within the campaign.”

Her much criticised allusion to the assassination of Robert Kennedy and her husband’s likening of the Obama victory in South Carolina to Jesse Jackson’s were “innocent historical references”, and he blamed the Obama camp for exploiting them and causing division.

However he made a thinly veiled warning that Obama’s race would be a problem in the general election:

“The racial factor hasn’t been pushed on the Democratic side; but we will have to see what the Republicans make of this.”

And Democrats cannot afford to be complacent and in John McCain they face a formidable adversary – and his candidacy is symbolic of the decline of the Republican model of government and the break up of the Republican coalition.

“McCain represents the manifestation of the break up of the Republican consensus,” said Blumenthal.   “Inside the Republican Party McCain is held in extreme suspicion by Republicans.  McCain is the only possible person who might win but is only there as the nominee because of the Republican collapse.”

Blumenthal’s comments came in conversation with the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland, as he discussed his new book The Strange Death of Republican America: Chronicles of a Collapsing Party.

In Blumenthal’s view, the Bush Administration has dug the Republican Party into a deep hole:

“Bush has created a whirlwind that has brought about the destruction of the Republican Party as we have known it, as the dominant governing party since 1968.  We are reaching the end of this era now, but it is self generated through arrogance and hubris and it is imploding.”

“This doesn’t mean that the Democrats will necessarily win the Presidency this time, but the Republican Party and its theory of government has been discredited in a fundamental way.”

“We have seen the zenith of Republican power, with the control of the Congress and the executive branch at once, and now they have entered their wilderness years.”

For Blumenthal, the Bush presidency was an aberration that prevented the emergence of a new Democratic era that was stolen from Gore following shenanigans in Florida and ultimately the Supreme Court.

Without a popular mandate, from the very start Bush was “skating on thin ice – the tide was already going out on his Presidency at that point.” 

The events of September 11th 2001 restored his Presidency and allowed him to motor to victory in 2004, which was “not a decisive victory but was taken as a key victory,” and provided a platform for a radical “regime that has sought to create a one party state, based on dogmatic, narrow ideological tenets.”
 
Blumenthal painted a vivid picture of the darkly malevolent role of Dick Cheney as the driving force behind an “Imperial Presidency”, a project forged during his time spent in the Nixon Administration.

“Cheney sought to create an unfettered, unaccountable Presidency beyond which even Nixon imagined possible.  He is a master of bureaucracy and understands how to control information for a very uncurious President, who has a black and white worldview and is highly susceptible to flattery.”

Cheney’s grand administrative strategy has fused with Karl Rove’s political tactics to sustain the Bush presidency, but have now turned voters off.

“In their arrogance they created a kind of radicalism that the people have now recoiled from.” 

The administration has been guilty of egregiously violating the separation of church and state in the Terry Schiavo “right to die” case, and, most critically, the response to Hurricane Katrina revealed administrative incompetence, cronyism and blindness to class inequality.  

Katrina revealed the ultimate flaw in Republican conception of governance:

“The Republican vision is that ‘government is the problem’: but here people needed government to help them.”

“By installing cronies and ideologues, Bush declared a war on professionalism, which was seen as a competing ideology to conservatism”

As discussion about the Bush Administration arced inevitably back to the current race for the White House, Blumenthal pointed out that the damage that the Bush Administration has done domestically and particularly abroad means that America’s next President “must have a deep understanding of how to fix government, at a time of two wars, economic duress and the price of oil,” clearly alluding to Clinton’s slogan that she will be “ready on day one.”

“The challenges to a new president will be enormous.  Enormous damage has been done to US interests and US strength, with messy problems with Iraq, Iran and Russia, and the basic institutions of national security severely damaged.”   

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