Obama and McCain offer a choice, not an echo

In the Republican corner it is to be John Sidney McCain III, white, age 71. In the Democratic corner we have Barack Hussein Obama, black, age 46. No American election battle since the days of Franklin Roosevelt has attracted so much worldwide attention. A recent visitor to North Korea, a nation supposedly hermetically sealed from the rest of the world, tells me that the first question his ‘minder’ asked was: ‘Who will win the American elections?’ His concern is unsurprising: a President McCain would favour continuing existing multilateral pressure on North Korea to eliminate its nuclear weapons, and might even give some meaning to the phrase ‘or else’. President Obama would meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-il to talk things over, no preconditions.

The rest of the world has broader reasons than does North Korea for its interest in the American elections. Two, in fact. The first is Barack Obama. The Illinois senator is the first African-American who will represent a major party in a presidential election. As if that is not enough, he is tall, handsome, articulate, telegenic and charismatic — an example of the personal becoming the political. For those Obama supporters who don’t remember that Jack Kennedy sent troops into Vietnam, and tempted Nikita Khrushchev to put missiles in Cuba by appearing weak at a no-preconditions summit, forcing a showdown that took the nation to the brink of nuclear war, Obama represents a return to the glorious days of Camelot, when a handsome couple occupied the White House, university professors dined there on French cuisine at a table arranged by Jackie Kennedy, and Texas boots sullied Vice-President Lyndon Johnson’s residence but not the Oval Office.

Equally important is David Miliband’s observation that none of the world’s problems can be solved without the co-operation of the United States. Whether it is a war in the Balkans, global warming, the world trading system, or the maintenance of world order — if the USA does not get involved, nothing good is likely to happen.