Guy Beres

How is it that some 14 years after Nelson Mandela became the first ever democratically elected President of South Africa, he is still (and for at least the next week or so) technically considered to be a terrorist by the United States Government? It is an embarrassment and a disgrace for the world’s most powerful democracy that it has taken a 90th birthday party celebration to gather the necessary momentum for correcting this painfully simple legislative injustice.

One would hope that as part of this ridiculous 14 year-old oversight the US Government takes the opportunity to reconsider its processes for periodically reviewing legislation such as this, enacted as it was by the Reagan Administration in the midst of the Cold War. Laws are not things to be made and then left to rust by political parties and the bureaucracy. Both the bureaucracy and a nation’s lawmakers should be constantly striving to improve the national body of legislation as circumstances and public attitudes change, not just as policies change.

And I have mixed emotions. Sure, Barack Obama has won the Democratic presidential nomination fair and square, he is a better orator, he does offer more likelihood of real change and a culture shift in Washington, and he is my preferred candidate for President of the United States. On the other hand, I feel fairly bad for Hillary. Neither the traditional conservative media outlets nor the liberal media outlets have done her any favours over the course of this gruelling and increasingly bitter campaign. One needs only to consider the nasty photographs published of her in the press over the past six months to realise that the world’s mainstream media, whether concertedly or implicitly, had it in for Hillary Clinton all along. Obama has been gifted a “cool candidate” framing by the media that has elevated his campaign to a degree that it is hard to quantify. One wonders what the result would have been if the media had ripped into both of the Democratic candidates equally over the past six months.

She would have been a pretty good President, despite it all. Of course, if Obama loses to McCain in November, this whole overblown, melodramatic saga is going to make Democrats and their supporters across the United States (and the globe) look and feel pretty stupid. The Democrats have certainly had the better and more competitive of the two nomination races. Now they really have to make it happen in the race that actually matters.

Of course, part of me will still not believe that the Democratic nomination race is over until I see Hillary Clinton utter her concession direct to camera. She has been nothing if not dogged and determined throughout, and for that she deserves high praise.

One of my pet hates when it comes to politics or political commentary is when someone’s opinion is condemned because of who they are rather than what they are actually saying. This sort of behaviour perhaps stems from the simplification process whereby we tend to reduce people to being either “good” or “bad” in our minds. Consider for a moment the following names, and whether you would classify them on the whole as being “good” or “bad”. You might be surprised at what your first instinct is for each one, depending on what your political tendencies are:

• The Dalai Lama
• Adolf Hitler
• John Howard
• Malcolm Fraser
• Bob Brown
• Fidel Castro

Of course, if you are a lefty, you might not like John Howard, but would it really be fair to characterise him as “bad”, alongside, presumably, Adolf Hitler? Realistically speaking, of course not. Any reasonable, rational person who disagrees with the Howard Government’s work would be forced, after some consideration, to place him somewhere in the middle of the scale, perhaps arguably even on the positive side of even steven if you were feeling generous (though I can’t say I am). I would imagine that someone on the conservative side of the fence would have to feel the same way about somebody like Bob Brown. Sure, you might think he is a bit loopy, but compared to some of the names who fall firmly in the “bad” column, any reasonable critic would judge him as relatively unobjectionable.

I think Fidel Castro’s column in the Guardian today strongly brings this little conundrum to mind. The topic of the column, bizarrely enough, is Barack Obama and the Democratic frontrunner’s comments on the trade embargo with Cuba, which would reportedly be continued under an Obama presidency. Now while I think most of us would probably agree that Castro has done the occasional good thing in relation to his country’s health and education systems, I think we would also agree that his militant aversion to criticism and indeed democracy is disturbing and hopelessly out of step with the modern civilised world we live in. Having said that, it is hard to disagree with the central thesis of Castro’s argument here; that perhaps the United States should take a good hard look at its own recent record on foreign policy and hop off its high horse before so harshly judging Cuba and by association the Cuban people:

Is it right for the president of the US to order the assassination of any one person in the world, whatever the pretext? Is it ethical for the president of the US to order the torture of other human beings? Should state terrorism be used by a country as powerful as the US as an instrument to bring peace to the planet?

Is an Adjustment Act, applied as punishment to only one country, Cuba, in order to destabilise it, good and honourable when it costs innocent children and mothers their lives? Are the brain drain and the continuous theft of the best scientific and intellectual minds in poor countries moral and justifiable?

Is it fair to stage pre-emptive attacks? Is it honourable and sane to invest millions and millions of dollars in the military-industrial complex, to produce weapons that can destroy life on earth several times over? Is that the way in which the US expresses its respect for freedom, democracy and human rights?

Of course there are plenty of things that Castro could have done during his lifetime that would have left the country in a much better position than it is today. However, I think in this particular scenario, the United States should have the moral stature to ignoring the ancient ideological squabbles and start engaging with Cuba again. I am disappointed that Obama, of all people, feels the need to perpetuate what seems to be a cold war mentality in an era when the next missile crisis the world is going to face is going to be quite far from this little island off the coast of Miami.

With the field of potential Democrat presidential hopefuls now narrowed down to just two; a woman and an African-American man, the United States is arguably in a better position than ever before in its history to finally install someone who isn’t an “old white man” into the White House. On considering this, my first thought is that it is something of an indictment of the US political system that today’s scenario has taken so long to materialise. Contrastingly, about a week ago, John Roskam from the IPA took a concertedly different tack in an SMH opinion column, attacking both critics of the Bush Administration and also the results Australia’s political system have produced in this area:

If the strength of a political system can be measured by the diversity of candidates seeking national leadership, there’s no comparison between Australia and America. In addition to Obama and Clinton for the Democrats, for the Republicans there is Mitt Romney, who is a Mormon; John McCain, a war hero; Rudy Giuliani, a Catholic of Italian heritage; and Mike Huckabee, an evangelical Christian.

Australia has had 26 prime ministers. Every one of them has been a male of Anglo-Celtic background.

There are a few points worth making about the line of argument that Roskam seems to be pushing. He is obviously correct in one sense; Australia’s short national political history is indeed almost unanimously littered with the success stories of Anglo-Celtic males. This is not something to be very proud of as a nation. However, it would seem to be drawing a bit of a long bow to use the admittedly varied field for this year’s US presidential primaries as the only point of comparison with Australia. For starters, it might also be worth highlighting the fact that of the Republican field, all but McCain has effectively been eliminated from contention for the presidency. McCain has already unsuccessfully contested the Republican nomination back in 2000, and of the two remaining Democratic candidates, one is the high-profile wife of a man who controlled the presidency for eight of the last twenty years. Throw in the fact that Bushes father and son have controlled the presidency for the remaining twelve of the last twenty years, and one could be forgiven for starting to wonder just how small the presidential gene pool really is in the United States.

The next issue we might consider is the issue of personal wealth. Throughout history, Australia’s Prime Ministers have certainly not all been financially well off like practically all of their US counterparts; the story of former engine driver Ben Chifley is perhaps the most obvious example. Tellingly, Roskam does not canvass a review of the backgrounds of a single one of Australia’s 26 Prime Ministers. As a contrast, we only need to consider some of the presidential campaign related news coming out of the United States. Recently, millionaires Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney have been forced by the US political system to pour their own personal wealth into their campaigns, in desperate attempts to remain competitive. The campaign of Mitt Romney, ostensibly the number two candidate for the Republicans through the primary campaigns, was arguably only made feasible by the fact that he had substantial financial resources under his control. While it is indeed technically possible for a poor person in the United States to become President, it is statistically extremely unlikely.

Finally, we might want to take a quick look at the current levels of gender representation in the United States and Australian governments. As of last year, 83.7% of US Congress is male, compared to 73% of the Australian House of Representatives and 65.8% of the Senate. None of these figures are particularly worthy of acclaim to be honest, but one would think that the “greatest democracy in the world”, with over double the history of Australian federal democracy, should be in a much better position by now.

The presidential race in the United States has quickly boiled down to a couple of candidates for each party: Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for the Democrats, and John McCain and Mitt Romney for the Republicans. For the Republicans it would seem that the outcome is a foregone conclusion, with McCain running with far greater momentum with Romney through recent state ballots. Contrastingly, I don’t think any of us watching is too keen to put their neck out in relation to predicting the Democratic nomination. From all reports, the margins are tight, and recent results which have run massively contrary to prior polling (e.g. New Hampshire) make one pretty sceptical of market research just at the moment.

For my money’s worth (and I have an extremely dubious track record on such matters), I am tipping Hillary Clinton to do better out of Super Tuesday for the Democrats than Obama. My preferred choice is of course the latter, but I just have a funny feeling that while Obama is pulling in young voters left, right and centre, he is not doing quite so well with the older, establishment set within the Democratic party. The recent comparisons of Obama to JFK and his endorsement by Teddy Kennedy seem at first glance to be real coups for the Obama campaign, but we mustn’t forget that Kennedy no longer represents what we might call the mainstream Democratic establishment. One imagines that a decent number of hard-nosed Democrat voters would have sensed alarm bells going off when Kennedy, with his controversial take on modern politics and his high profile, backed Obama, who has less political experience and less global political connections than his counterpart. The Obama campaign team have attempted to turn this inexperience into a positive by taking an anti-establishment, anti-insider approach to the media markets, but this may ultimately prove hurtful to the campaign, as it appeared to be in some respects for John Edwards who was even more aggressive on this line.

I guess we’ll find out one way or another soon enough. If we do eventually end up with a third Clinton Administration – my one frivolous hope is that Clinton hires Obama and his team for writing and delivering her speeches. If we are talking about the craft of language and the ability to inspire people with words, I don’t think there is any doubt that Obama knocks Clinton, her husband, and the entire bevy of Republican candidates right out of the park.