Much of Kevin Rudd’s foreign policy ambition remains in suspension, awaiting president Obama or president McCain, either of whom will bring new authority and distinguish their policies from President George W. Bush. So far Rudd has finessed Bush with skill. But John Howard remains Bush’s Australian prime minister and Rudd knows there are strict limits to what he can accomplish with the current administration.
Republican White House hopeful John McCain’s campaign is highly sensitive to the imagery of holding a celebratory convention as a potential natural disaster looms, after the botched handling of Hurricane Katrina three years go. Republican Party officials were mulling different scenarios, including curtailing the convention.
All data points to an enormous Obama win. If the Democratic candidate doesn’t win in the current circumstances, it would be a miracle. So what’s making a miracle possible, especially given, as I believe, that Obama is a brilliant politician? It seems the American people still harbour doubts about him.
Bill Clinton’s speech showed the fundamental difference between the two parties. Democrats say and, as far as I can tell, really believe that working Americans are getting a raw deal; Republicans, despite occasional attempts to sound sympathetic, basically believe that people have nothing to complain about.
In tones that seemed alternately angry and mischievous, the Russian Prime Minister suggested that the Bush administration may have tried to create a crisis that would influence American voters in the choice of a successor to President Bush.
Senator Barack Obama accepted the Democratic Party presidential nomination on Thursday, declaring that the “American promise has been threatened” by eight years under President Bush and that John McCain represented a continuation of policies that undermined the nation’s economy and imperiled its standing around the world.
Senator Obama would do well to remember one of the catchphrases of Bill Clinton’s campaign against George Bush senior in 1992: “It’s the economy, stupid.” As important as foreign policy - and Iraq - will be in this campaign, the financial plight of Americans, and how that will have an impact on voting patterns, cannot be dismissed.
After the end of the Cold War, the United States could have done so much to continue the advance to an even more effective, rules-based system where law governed relations between states. Instead, today’s America has pushed these high aspirations and noble principles aside and led us, step by step, to a point of crisis. What went wrong?
Flanked by two Russian flags, President Dmitry Medvedev announced he had signed decrees recognising the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the two regions at the heart of the conflict that erupted this month in Georgia. “This is not an easy choice, but it is the only way to save the lives of people,” Mr. Medvedev said in a nationally-televised address.
George W. Bush’s remark in 2000 that America “stands alone right now in the world in terms of power” no longer rings true. Great shifts are apparent in global politics and Washington must increasingly compete for favour. This global uncertainty confronts senators Barack Obama and John McCain in their race for the White House.