Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Obama’s offer: an end to US stupidity

Obama’s offer: an end to US stupidity
Ovvero non tutti i britt sono dei buchi di culo come il fascista Amal
Speeches matter. Barack Obama’s oration to the Democratic convention on
Thursday was an epic performance. He held 80,000 people in his hand. He made
them laugh and he made them cry. He was humble and he was grand. He thanked
the right people, especially Hillary Clinton, and in the right order.
Churchill, even in despair, knew he could give the nation a fillip with a
speech. Kennedy agonised over his speeches. The last address by Martin
Luther King was the essence of his fame. Politics is the art of
communicating intimacy to a crowd. No television chat show can match the
rhetoric of a Cicero, a Henry V, a Wesley or a Gladstone.
Obama’s handling of family, friends, opponents, even God, seemed personal
and deft. The cadences, timing and body language were faultless, conveying
sympathies of pain, pleasure and, above all, hope. Obama gets the point. He
is good at Cicero.
But too good? We know Obama can speak. He can also write. I have read both
his books and they, too, are good. His autobiography, Dreams from My Father,
written when he was 33, is a masterpiece in the tradition of the American
search for identity. The Audacity of Hope, written when he had become a
senator, is no less articulate as a study in American politics. On any
showing this man has emerged as an intelligent and exciting figure. At the
very least it would be intriguing to see how he would perform as president
of America and leader of the free world.
At this point a classic American cussedness enters the debate. Whether he
should win is confused with whether he can win. The world’s greatest
festival of democracy descends into paradox. Is America, the home of black
advancement, “ready” to elect a black man? Is Obama too elitist yet too
popular, too radical yet too much a trimmer, too Harvard yet too exotic in
his poor background? Is he too inexperienced abroad yet too much liked
abroad? Is he too slim, too happy? Is he just too . . . everything?
For a man who has had to fight his way against every conceivable
disadvantage, this must be hard to take. Black Americans may no longer need
to know their place, but they should know their style. It should not embrace
a booming self-confidence.
As John McCain this week enters the spotlight, these qualities will be
tested yet again, as they were in the bruising fight with Hillary Clinton.
McCain’s selection of a conservative beauty star, Sarah Palin, as his
running mate somehow balances the Obama charisma with glamour. It certainly
balances Obama’s choice of a liberal old-timer, Joe Biden.
It also stamps this presidential contest as emphatically one of opposites.
McCain is running as a conservative. The specifics in Obama’s speech – and
he was not afraid of them – indicate a politician of traditional Democratic
credentials. Obama is for those suffering the recession, for the poor and
middling rich and against the corporate America that has lived high on the
hog under the Republicans. He is set on healthcare reform, welfare reform
and higher rate taxation. He is no great friend of free trade.
Obama may have little executive experience, but neither has his opponent.
What can be seen from the campaign is positive: aides protest that he runs a
disciplined ship. There has been none of the acrimony and bust-ups that
normally consume the primary trail.
Certainly Obama has played the cautious legislator, equivocating over gun
control, Iraq and Afghanistan. He has been goaded into showing himself
tougher than tough in foreign policy, yet has chosen his words with care. On
America’s gaffe-strewn morality agenda, he has been sure-footed.
Of all the accusations against Obama at home that have so puzzled America’s
friends abroad, none has seemed more bizarre than that he is popular with
them. There is no contest here. In Europe, Gallup recently put Obama on
between 50% and 85% support, with McCain in the range of 15%-20%. Across
Africa, Asia and Latin America, Obama leads by nine to one. He is by far the
most popular world politician in a generation. This surely matters. It is a
contest from which the world cannot stand aloof, since American presidents
do not stand aloof from the world.
Every American voter casts a de facto proxy vote for the disenfranchised
millions who consume America’s foreign and military policy abroad, from
Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan and Burma to benighted Palestine. For tens of
thousands of them, an American president is the difference between life and
death. Millions more depend on the presidential election as beneficiaries of
US aid, or as victims of US hostility and sanctions. Billions of Iranians,
Pakistanis, Russians and Chinese have an interest as nations which American
governments criticise and threaten. Obama’s global popularity lead over
McCain is thus more than a beauty contest. Were he to be elected, his
country would unquestionably experience an immediate and dramatic surge in
popularity.
In Pakistan recently I was shocked at the antiAmericanism displayed in
opinion polls, the media and in conversation. This was not just the result
of a decade of US hamfisted military intervention in the region. It also
arose from the intervention having fuelled a reaction among Islamist
fundamentalists, whom moderate Pakistanis fear as much as do Americans. Such
people do not hate the United States; only the stupidity of its governments.
This is the hope that Obama offers the world, of an end to stupidity. His
name, his ethnicity and his message of conciliation and negotiation promise
a new chapter. Americans, locked in the prison of their media and their
aversion to travel, cannot begin to realise how powerful a message would go
out in the election of a black president.
This is unrelated to what such an election would mean in practice.
Obama has been forced to back away from an immediate end to the Iraq war and
wants, recklessly, to entrap his country further in the unwinnable Taliban
insurgency in Afghanistan/Pakistan. He also appears compliant in the insane
Nato strategy of encircling Russia with belligerent states.
The truth is that liberal presidents are often forced to be illiberal,
doveish ones to be hawkish. Obama would find it hard to appease Palestine,
Iran, the Taliban or Moscow. He would find it hard to face down his
protectionist supporters in the unions: witness his offer to use federal
money to “stop the exporting of American jobs”. He would find it hard to
give meaning to “ending American dependence on Middle East oil”.
For all that, no student of this man can doubt his intelligence or his
sensitivity to shifts in world opinion. Obama’s account in his memoir of the
US legal system as “a nation arguing with its conscience” might also refer
to a presidential election. This argument, he believes, should be so
conducted that “what binds us together might somehow ultimately prevail”.
This optimistic vision of America might equally refer to the world. After a
period when that great nation has made such a mess of trying to rule a
unipolar world, Obama offers to clear its decks and start afresh. It is on
that opportunity as much as anything within America that its citizens are
about to vote.
simon....@sunday-times.co.uk
Saluti
--------------------------------
Inviato via 
http://arianna.libero.it/usenet/

 Obama’s offer: an end to US stupidity
e allora perde, visto che la stupidità negli USA fa premio anzichè
essere fonte di vergogna


Puo' darsi.
Uno dei rischi della democrazia, i tedeschi nel 39 avrebbero votato per la
guerra.
Gli Yankee di oggi, staremo avedere.


 guerra.
Ma non lo fecero, nazi.
Tb


sappiamo tutti quanto era forte la resistenza del popolo tedesco
all'Anschluss e alla presa dei Sudeti e di tutto il resto...