Back
06-12-2008, 05:59 PM
Great piece by the BBC today. The significance of Obama’s candidacy as viewed from across the pond. I’m just going to post some snippits I found noteworthy.
After an electoral process that makes a round of Harry Potter's favourite game Quidditch look simple, the Democratic Party has eventually chosen a man whose name - some Americans can't help noticing - rhymes with Osama, and whose middle name is Hussein; who was brought up in Hawaii and Indonesia, and whose father was a Kenyan economist.
And all this in the middle of a war against foreign extremists.
If you had tried to sell the Obama story to the fiction editor of a major publishing company they would have laughed at you and ushered you to the door.
Good fiction needs to be plausible, they would have bleated.
Great reality can be as implausible as it wants, America has now replied.
Obama's nomination has achieved in one night what hand-wringing Bush diplomacy has failed to deliver in four years: a powerful signal that America still has the power to surprise and inspire.
It proves that the revolutionary heart of this nation founded on ideas borrowed from the European Enlightenment still beats despite Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.
Obama may be a global citizen but to voters in West Virginia or parts of Ohio that sounds as pretentious as a double decaf Venti latte.
But before the German politician who wrote that Obama was a cross between John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King gets too sniffy about those hillbillies in America, just remember this:
Germany has a minority of four million Turks, but has elected only a handful of ethnic Turks to the Bundestag.
An ethnic Pakistani Prime Minister taking up residence at Number 10 Downing Street is even less likely than England winning the World Cup.
In Beijing, the overt racism shown to African students brought over under the bygone days of international Communism is truly shocking.
Even if America is not ready to elect a black president, the rest of the world has no right to point the finger.
And there is always the possibility that Obama failed not because he was black, not because he was too global, but simply because his vision of America's future did not add up.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7449663.stm
After an electoral process that makes a round of Harry Potter's favourite game Quidditch look simple, the Democratic Party has eventually chosen a man whose name - some Americans can't help noticing - rhymes with Osama, and whose middle name is Hussein; who was brought up in Hawaii and Indonesia, and whose father was a Kenyan economist.
And all this in the middle of a war against foreign extremists.
If you had tried to sell the Obama story to the fiction editor of a major publishing company they would have laughed at you and ushered you to the door.
Good fiction needs to be plausible, they would have bleated.
Great reality can be as implausible as it wants, America has now replied.
Obama's nomination has achieved in one night what hand-wringing Bush diplomacy has failed to deliver in four years: a powerful signal that America still has the power to surprise and inspire.
It proves that the revolutionary heart of this nation founded on ideas borrowed from the European Enlightenment still beats despite Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.
Obama may be a global citizen but to voters in West Virginia or parts of Ohio that sounds as pretentious as a double decaf Venti latte.
But before the German politician who wrote that Obama was a cross between John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King gets too sniffy about those hillbillies in America, just remember this:
Germany has a minority of four million Turks, but has elected only a handful of ethnic Turks to the Bundestag.
An ethnic Pakistani Prime Minister taking up residence at Number 10 Downing Street is even less likely than England winning the World Cup.
In Beijing, the overt racism shown to African students brought over under the bygone days of international Communism is truly shocking.
Even if America is not ready to elect a black president, the rest of the world has no right to point the finger.
And there is always the possibility that Obama failed not because he was black, not because he was too global, but simply because his vision of America's future did not add up.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7449663.stm