Turnout will be high, probably about sixty-two to sixty-five per cent of potential voters. This will be about the same level of political participation enjoyed by other Western democracies, from Canada to New Zealand, Germany to the United Kingdom. They, like the United States, assign to political parties and their candidates that central democratic task of engaging the citizenry in the political process. In occupying its lonely outpost of compulsory voting, Australia, almost alone in the Western world, shifts the responsibility of enthusing and engaging the citizenry from the parties, allegedly agents of democratic change, to the dreary process of state compulsion.

The selection process in the American election guarantees that, whatever the outcome, an outlier wins. John McCain is no George W. Bush, and Barack Obama is no Hillary Clinton. Insofar as either the Republicans or the Democrats have an ‘Establishment’, it has been ravaged by this campaign, one of the happy consequences of opening up the selection process to the people rather than confining it to élites. Neither ‘party’, in the sense of the Clinton Democrats or the Bush Republicans, is happy with the people’s choice.

In November 2004, at what proved to be the height of the Bush era, it all looked different. The authoritative National Journal featured a cover picture of Bush and a headline that said ‘On a Roll’. At the same time, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, two British journalists who wrote often about the United States for The Economist, decided they would explain to a mystified Britain the nature of life and politics in a conservative America and the prospect of an enduring American conservatism in which the Republican Party would become the natural party of government. Micklethwait and Wooldridge explored in ‘The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America’ the sudden and surprising rise of conservatism in the United States. They noted how different American ‘conservatism’ was from its British or European (or Australian) counterpart. In some sense, the United States has always been conservative, but the values conserved were profoundly liberal. The conservative American mind has been far more individualist, populist and optimistic – and far less hankering after tradition, far less interested in élitism, and far more nationalistic, than its ideological cousins.

Micklethwait and Wooldridge laid out the path that the Republican Party had followed in achieving its modern ascendancy, reinventing conservatism, winning the ‘battle of ideas’ with the help of new powerful think-tanks and developing a new ‘values’ mantra that resonated in the heartland. Despite Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, the Republicans, riding the ‘values’ theme, took control of both houses of Congress two years later and the White House six years after that. Suddenly, the Democrats, who had been the ‘natural majority’ for two generations, in the ascendancy in Congress for sixty years (with a few brief exceptions) and often holding the White House, were swept from power. Now Republicans ruled in Washington – and in the states, holding the governorships of many states and a majority of state legislatures. They were the party of the expanding suburbs, the party of the growth regions – the South and the South West.

Karl Rove, the once all-powerful genius behind the triumph of the modern Republican Party, imagined that Bush could be like William McKinley, who, if a forgettable president himself, nevertheless at the turn of the century joined the party to the new industrial order and inaugurated a thirty-year ascendancy for Republicans. The ‘system of 1896’ prevailed until the Great Depression ushered in the Democratic era.

The changes of the 1980s and 1990s suggested that the golden age could be regained. In Bush, Rove saw the modern McKinley, transforming the Congress and presidential results into an enduring lock on political power. The terrorist attacks of 2001 only seemed to confirm that potential legacy. The Republican Party, dominant on the domestic scene in terms of the values war, now stood tall on terrorism and security on the foreign scene. And yet these young writers also set out how Rove’s dream could become a nightmare. It would all go south if either wing of the party began to beat erratically – if those running with the heartland values veered toward intolerance, and if the business conservatives spun out of control by adopting policies that cannibalised the heartland.

In a way, that is exactly what happened. The trends the authors saw quickly became more dominant. On the morals side, there was the Terry Schiavo case, in which the federal government sought to bring its weight to bear to prevent the removal of life-support equipment from a young woman who had been in a persistent vegetative state for some fifteen years. On the economic side, the federal deficits ballooned as the cost of fighting a ‘war on terror’ grew, whether domestically in the creation of the Department of Homeland Security or internationally in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even more important was the wish of the Bush administration to expand the reach of government in areas such as education and health care, all the while cutting taxes.

Rove’s dream is gone now, and while historians may one day redeem the Bush administration, this election is about two quite different trajectories, a choice that Paul Starobin, in The National Journal, identified as being between honour and empathy.

Honour is the defining feature of John McCain: honour for the traditions he and his military family (a navy fighter pilot, the son and grandson of admirals in the navy) represent, honour for American commitments as in Iraq, and honour in the fight against corruption, whether in his own party or on Wall Street. American troops will come home from Iraq with victory, and he is honour-bound to fight corruption wherever it is found. Here is a military code as a personal code. McCain titled his memoir Faith of My Fathers (1999).

The title of Obama’s memoir also speaks to his essence. Dreams from My Father (1995) identifies the centrality of empathy to him. Obama would bring to the White House a remarkable detachment. His capacity to place himself in another’s shoes reflects his life, as the son of a white mother from Kansas and a black student from Kenya, who grew up in the multiculturalism of Hawaii and then with a second father in Indonesia. Empathy is the quintessential stance of the outsider, and this is a stance which, so far, has served Obama remarkably well.

For all of the attractions of the political processes that have brought these two outliers to the ballot paper, it is disappointing that the American media has done so little, with a few notable exceptions, to explore the consequences for governance of these contrasting value sets. The ‘24/7’ media feeding frenzy, the ‘gotcha’ journalism and news cycles which must refresh on the hour, all direct attention to the most superficial of topics rather than the one that matters most: who, McCain or Obama, has the personal attributes to be the great president that the United States, and the times, need?

We can see the same superficiality in the fixation to assign the blame for the liquidity crisis afflicting the United States and world credit markets. The problem has complex roots. Some of them began growing in the 1990s with a sincere wish to expand home ownership for a group of people, many blacks and Hispanics, who had little chance in the conventional mortgage market of ever acquiring their own home. In this, Fannie Mae, the largest underwriter of home mortgages in the United States, led the way, setting itself the goal of placing half of its loans in the hands of low and moderate income borrowers. Many men and women of goodwill – many of them members of the Congress – signed onto this goal. Appreciating this history would be a better first step in understanding the pernicious influence of a housing bubble on policy settings than moralistic denunciations of ‘greed.’

Certainly, some on Wall Street and some in unscrupulous banks took advantage of the housing bubble to ensnare those who could never survive the least decline in the market value of their home. Banks advertised that there was ‘$25,000 hidden in your home; let us help you find it’, through what became known as ‘equity loans’, turning, in the way of the world of advertising, a stigma once known as a ‘second mortgage’ into a virtue, a hip response of modern financial wisdom in a world of inevitable increases in wealth. A generation which had never understood the risk of debt signed on to help create a culture of debt. To project the financial collapse of the housing market and the ensuing financial chaos as the virtuous undone by the triumph of ‘greed,’ as the Australian prime minister has recently suggested, is to follow a simplistic media into simplistic politics.

A better media might also ask this question: given that on 21 January 2009 one outlier or the other will move into the White House, what risks should we understand are associated with the choice between them?

Though the likelihood of a McCain presidency is lesser at this writing, it is worth noting that a presidency built on an honour code can lead to rigid categorisation in circumstances where flexibility is so often the central requirement. Perhaps McCain’s track record of compromise across the partisan divide on domestic legislation concerning campaign finance reform and immigration assuages that fear somewhat – but only in the domestic sphere.

The likelihood of an Obama presidency is greater, but the risks of an empathetic presidency, while different, are not fewer. Obama, in his existential perspective on himself, has said he likes to see himself as a Rorschach test, an enigma which the observer decodes according to his own values. But history suggests that being a passive vehicle for the aspirations of others is a sure course for a failed presidency: Jimmy Carter without the idealism. Aloofness and ambiguity are ways of handling the contradictions so central to Obama’s story – to engage on neither side – but the very essence of the job of the American president is leadership and decisive engagement, not disengagement.

All choices come with risks. If the American media has done far less than it might have to identify those risks, the political process has itself produced the certainty of a ‘change election’ and perhaps accorded the American people rather well. November 4 will finally bring to an end the extraordinary American campaign of 2008, and it will leave us with a president defined by a commitment to honour or one committed to empathy. Whether the result will serve the American, and the Australian, people well is a question we will soon be able to begin to answer.