Thursday - November 06, 2008

Barack Obama, come to save the world.  (GOOD. NOW ARE WHITES, “FREE AT LAST?")

Barack Obama, come to save the world

By Bryony Gordon
Last Updated: 8:01pm GMT 05/11/2008

Well, that’s a relief, isn’t it? Barack Obama is the new president of the world and we can all sleep soundly in our beds, having sweet dreams that involve skipping through fields hand in hand with loved ones to a soundtrack of The Greatest Love of All, as butterflies flutter overhead. Goodbye terror, farewell loser, hello change. Whatever will wannabe Miss Worlds wish for now?

(the point of this article was that young Brits in numbers were encouraging Americans to vote Obama while they didn’t even know and show no interest in, their own politics here at home. Article is followed by lots of angry comments on her comments.)

http://tinyurl.com/6b2tzy

Barack Obama’s historic victory: Now we need to find out what ‘change’ means

By Simon Heffer in New York
Last Updated: 7:01pm GMT 05/11/2008

This is a pivotal moment in America’s history and, therefore, that of the world. In a country that forced black people on to separate buses within recent memory, and drove them away from polling stations at elections, the advent of a black president has a resonance that should not be understated. It is easy to be distracted by an event that proves, as the new president-elect said in his victory speech on Tuesday night, that in America anything is now possible, and old bigotries and barriers have finally been broken down. But that is not the sole, or main, significance of what has happened.

America is in economic turmoil. Its place as the world’s superpower makes it a magnet for challenges by rogue and aggressive states, and more of these are certain to come - President Medvedev of Russia has already started squaring up to President-elect Obama. Neo-conservatism tried, and largely failed, to deal with those and other lesser challenges over the past eight years. From January, a very different one will be applied. Barack Obama has come this far on a tsunami of rhetoric and charisma. Now he must undertake a responsibility for which those qualities will not necessarily qualify him. He must govern.

On a balmy election night in the plaza outside the Rockefeller Centre - a skyscraper and estate built in the depths of the last great economic meltdown as an act of defiance towards it - a packed crowd watched Mr Obama’s march. Despite the solidity of New York behind the Democrats, there was still no great euphoria - that has been confined to America’s equivalent of the chattering classes, and to the new president’s home turf in Chicago. There has, though, been an act of faith by the US electorate on a gigantic scale, as it thrusts this unproven and untested man into the teeth of these challenges. The public is relieved to hear the burial service read over the grave of the 43rd, discredited presidency. We must now see how long it will be able to suspend its disbelief over the programme of “change” promised for the 44th.

We have seen this in Britain: one is constantly reminded of the advent of New Labour in 1997, the massive expectations of “change” and - inevitably - the consequent disappointment and disillusion. The Republicans claim Mr Obama made spending promises totalling $1.3 trillion during the past 21 months. It highlights the confrontation with reality that he will have to face when he enters the White House on January 20. Yet this is only part of it. To match the Democrat victory for the presidency, there has been an even more significant set of gains for the party in the House of Representatives and the Senate.

His party can now with ease get any law it wants on to the statute book. Mr Obama needs, in that context, to begin his transition to power by asking himself one important question. Did he, and his party, win so heavily because America has shifted notably to the Left - or did they do so simply because they were not Republicans?

If the answer is the first contention, we may well be about to see the greatest era of radicalism in American politics since Roosevelt. If America really is no longer an instinctively conservative nation, Mr Obama can proceed with tax increases, the extension

of public services such as healthcare, the introduction of environmental legislation, the legitimisation of many millions of illegal immigrants, and the provision of federal funds to pay for abortions. It is not beyond possibility that Mr Obama could even find himself taken prisoner by his own party, as Nancy Pelosi, as Speaker of the House, leads it through a radical programme that takes the new president at his word about “change”.

http://tinyurl.com/6maajw

Posted by peiper     on 11/06/2008 at 03:21 AM   
Filed Under: • Editorials • Politics •  
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