But there's no point being churlish about this. Obama deserves his victory if only for having stood up to the onslaught of two of the hitherto most powerful machines in world politics - the Republican machine, and the Clinton machine.
I still don't buy all the silky, JFK-style rhetoric. I've already lived too long and seen too many smooth-tongued politicians worm their way into the affections of the British public to believe in all that stuff. But underneath it all Obama strikes me as a decent sort of man, and if he can restore some stability to American foreign policy and its domestic economy over the next few years he will be well on the way to becoming a great president.
Did he win it, or did McCain lose it? A bit of both I think. Obama clearly came into this election as the "change candidate" and played that hand for all it was worth, both against Clinton and later against McCain. But I think McCain also made errors, notably in failing to do enough to differentiate himself from the increasingly despised George W. Bush and claiming after the collapse of Lehman brothers that the American economy was "fundamentally sound."
Was making Sarah Palin his running mate an error? That's a difficult one to call. She certainly energised the McCain campaign and brought a much-needed touch of glamour, but perhaps a man of 72 who has had cancer four times should have paid slightly more heed to experience in selecting the person who would be "a heartbeat away from the presidency."
As for the most hilarious spectacle in the election, it has to be the sight of British Tories attempting to clamber aboard the Obama bandwagon once it became reasonably clear he was going to win. No matter that he's the most left-wing president since Franklin D. Roosevelt - there's absolutely nothing the ideology-free-zone that is today's Tory Party won't do to get with the zeitgeist.
6 comments:
there's absolutely nothing the ideology-free-zone that is today's Tory Party won't do to get with the zeitgeist.
In this instance the words 'Tory' and 'Labour' are interchangeable. Brown held Obama at arms length when the wind was in Hillary Clinton's sails.
Now all this is over, I'm looking forward to hearing and reading about UK matters again.
There may be no future in England's dreaming, but at least it's our no future.
It does depress me that so much of the coverage has dwelt on the colour of Obama's skin, with so little attention given to his beliefs and abilities. Clearly he's an unusually capable public speaker, but what of his true ideas on foreign policy, or his understanding of economics?
One good thing comes of this: we may be spared a few weeks of the bigoted anti-Americanism of so much of the press and broadcast media, before they revert to type.
Surely you must therefore find it amusing that Gordon Brown is desperate to distance himself from John McCain, despite meeting him before he met Obama and being desperate to get a photo of Sarah Brown with Sarah Palin when she was announced as the VP?
Paul,
I think you will find some British Tories were supporting Obama when most of the British Labour Party were actively supporting Clinton and Tony Blair was making his preference for McCain fairly clear.
See here as an example: http://www.platform10.org/the-view-from-here/article/?no=344
I found this blog surfing.
I don't support Obama, but I believe he defeated McCain, as much as McCain defeated himself. He built a machine every state, as opposed to the Clinton strategy of only building in big states.
I think the Tories direction is the future of the Republicans.
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