Is Barack Obama enough of an American? Can a person be well-educated, dark-skinned and a real American at the same time? Obama’s election hinges on whether a majority thinks the latter is possible or is so self-evident that the question is silly. The McCain-Palin ticket’s central strategy still is to stoke doubt and keep the first question alive. It cannot be denied that this election would get much less attention were it a contest between a young white liberal-centrist and an old white right-wing...

Election Day 2008 will be an epic reckoning between old and new America. For the first time, battle lines are drawn defining a divide not between left and right or Democrat and Republic but between those who see the US as a part, albeit overwhelmingly strong, of a global community and others who see it as a fortress besieged by the world. Donald Rumsfeld’s derision of old and new Europeans turns out to be truer about the US than it is about the continent that first exported people to settle...

If elected, Barack Obama will be the first truly independent President of modern times without a large debt of gratitude to big business and financiers. For the nearly two grueling years of campaigning, he is carried aloft by millions of ordinary people and financed for the most part by contributions of less than $100. His debt is to the people. Obama has already made history not because he is black but because he has signposted an inspiring electoral process truly based on people’s involvement....

Anti-Americanism is good politics and flourishing in most countries. It will receive fresh energy from the McCain-Palin ticket’s new definition of an anti-American as being anyone who is not Joe Six-pack living in Middle America. This parochial narrative of Palin’s handlers, who seem to be as unaware as she of the world out there, is far from the values of most other nations. But it comforts the perception of Americans and their government as being hypocrites whose actions are far less noble...

The entire world wants Barack Obama. If he were to stand for President of Earth, he’d be voted in by 75% to 99% in favor from Chile to Papua New Guinea and Iceland to South Korea. Web developer Seth Carnes and a few friends have set up an interesting web site called “THEWORLDFOR.COM: Help select the new President” where non-Americans (and Americans) can vote to choose between the Obama and John McCain tickets. Overall, people around the world are 89% in favor of Obama compared with 11% for...

Barack Obama and John McCain are locked in the wrong battle of words over the panic stricken American economy as it slips into recession. They are sparring over the kind of tax relief each will deliver, incentives to save jobs and regulations to curtail the greed of investment bankers and fund managers. Though relevant for the longer term, these are mistaken prescriptions for the next 6-8 months because the fear causing financial collapse worldwide goes beyond demand issues, the US tax system, banker’s...

The Senate’s $700 billion bailout plan is getting a lukewarm reception in Asian markets, including Japan, where investors have been watching it very closely. Japanese markets opened without much excitement although it is still too early to see any real trends. The wariness abroad stems mainly from fears that the underlying US bricks and mortar economy, also called the real economy, may not be as strong as everyone hopes. The financial economy, especially the giant investment and mortgage banks...

Joe Biden’s virtues as a foreign policy stalwart, especially his personal access to foreign leaders, are being overstated. Despite the opining of American analysts, he is not well known in Europe and even less so in other parts of the world. Obama is the star feted by the world. He is the one who pounded Hilary Clinton and put the Republicans in a defensive crouch. Now there is an even chance that Biden will take some shine off the star instead of adding to it. International audiences knew little...

NATO’s decision to freeze relations with Moscow and Washington’s inept handling of Pakistan are strategic foreign policy mistakes. They are interlinked and give cause for celebration to al Qaeda and other rabid anti-Americans. The Western allies may regret them in coming years. The mistakes stem from a conceit among US leaders including Barack Obama and John McCain that America is much more important for Russia than Russia is for the US. This should be reviewed seriously and with an open mind...

By whatever name, the Cold War has already begun because the NATO allies meet in Brussels tomorrow to find ways of punishing Russia for its invasion of Georgia. The premise of this search is hostility, not friendship. At the same time, the invasion and Russia’s victory have revealed the true cost to America and Europe of the wars in Serbia, Iraq and Afghanistan. Whatever the White House spin on the invasion and its aftermath, people outside the West see that Russia successfully stood by its friends...

The Russian invasion of Georgia has removed the lid over the simmering tensions between Russia and the Western allies that could easily turn into a new Cold War, stoked by hardliners on both sides. This “Cool War” is low intensity compared to the one with the former Soviet Union but the mistrust between Russia and the Western democracies can no longer be papered over and will take a long time to heal. The US is faced with a fait accompli. Russia has effectively obtained a conquest over disputed...

Senator Barack Obama will get a much warmer welcome in Europe than in Israel after his fact finding trips to Iraq and Afghanistan but the honeymoon could be short-lived were he to become President. The people in Germany, France and other countries are enthusiastic about Obama because having anyone other than George Bush in the White House would be a relief. Many would like to see Obama there because he is young and charismatic and thinks more like them about international issues. For many Europeans,...

Iran’s goal seems to be to bait Israel into quickly making precision attacks on its nuclear installations before diplomatic options are exhausted. Its apparently irrational regime may think the mess in the region will be so great that it will obtain even bigger gains in political influence than those from the debacle in Iraq. So it is deftly buying time through diplomacy and has received another prolongation of deadlines to halt its nuclear fuel enrichment activities. This concession was won a...

It is wishful thinking for Americans of any political hue to expect that Barack Obama or John McCain will be able to fight terrorism quite differently from George Bush, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere. His shoot-from-the-hip policies have created long term cages that make it almost impossible for the US to change course regardless of hope-filled audacity. The fact is that post-Bush terrorism has no purely military or non-military solution. Victory will come, if ever, from the right mix...

An air strike by Israel on Iran’s nuclear facilities will shatter both Washington’s credibility in world affairs and its own long term security. The intensified chatter that Israel may act before the November election or soon afterwards should be cause for consternation to all its supporters. Whatever Teheran’s rhetoric of peace, we should work on the premise that it is covertly developing nuclear warheads capable of reaching as far as Western Europe within 5-15 years. Undoubtedly, that...

As Barack Obama and John McCain haggle over immigration and reasons for the energy mess, they are sticking their heads in the sand about the real problem. That problem is the growing loss of faith among Americans in their ability to face the future as they struggle with consumer debt that has risen to $14 trillion from $8 trillion during George Bush’s sojourn in the White House. The need now is not for slogans about hope or “Change we can believe in”. It is to rebuild the people’s ability...

Rivals Barack Obama and John McCain agree on one thing – that persistence of $4-a-gallon gasoline will damage their electoral prospects. Obama democrats often place the blame on Big Oil, speculators and price gougers while McCain’s people blame controls on drilling offshore or in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Both sides agree that the US has compelling reasons both economic and geopolitical to sharply reduce its use of oil and import less from the unstable Middle East. Many from both...

An Obama-Clinton ticket has numerous pitfalls. On the plus side, it would be a like a surgical incision that in a single stroke removes the early-stage cancer caused to America’s high standing in the world by the Bush regime’s short-sighted hubris. This piece looks at the plus. Subsequent contributions will attempt to describe pitfalls. The damage done to America’s place in the world is like a cancer that spreads to unexpected locations unless it is caught early and excised. This remark is...

Now comes the hard part. Barack Obama has moved up from being underdog to the Presidential nominee of the Democratic Party by humbling the Party’s first family of Hillary and Bill Clinton. Hopefully, the somewhat narcissistic focus of Primary season watchers on the Democratic Party’s internal squabbles will now widen to issues that really matter for America and the world. Yes, some of the squabbling was unseemly since it involved a white woman from America’s equivalent of royalty, however...

With near certainty now that Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee, even doubters should accept that there is a fundamental current of change within the US to overcome the dark chapters of its history of racial discrimination. If he defeats John McCain in November, the message American voters will send to the world will echo Martin Luther King’s dream of having a country where a person is judged by his character and worth rather than skin color or origin. This should be cause for satisfaction...

The Dalai Lama is a holy person first and a politician second. It is worth remembering this during his visits to Seattle and elsewhere in America, in the current emotionally charged atmosphere over China’s Olympic Games. When I met him in Dharamsala, India, the Dalai Lama said his mind was on “Shoonya”, a Sanskrit word for emptiness experienced as profound serenity. It was in 1990 and he was coming to terms with China’s suppression of uprisings in which several hundred people died. He subsequently...

The emerging shape of battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is not reassuring. Obama won hearts because he filled them with hope for an America marked by cleaner politics and more ethical interaction with the world. Clinton won many minds by making those who worry about America’s enemies and economic troubles feel that she offers a more masterly set of hands at the tiller. She played dirty but Barack kept the high road until the shocks of Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island. It now seems that...

Many optimists think Main Street voters have moved beyond the “Guess who’s coming to dinner” syndrome of 1967. They think that all Barack Hussein Obama Jr. must do to win the Oval Office is to compete fairly and squarely with Hillary Clinton and John McCain. Among other arguments, they point to the support of white voters for Obama in Georgia and several other states on Super Tuesday and later in Louisiana, Nebraska and Washington. I would love to be persuaded but fear their optimism is like...

Celebrating his near equality with Hillary Clinton after Super Tuesday, Barack Obama said in Chicago that there are many rounds to fight in the remaining fierce competition but “we’re turning out to be a scrappy little team.” He will need every bit of brawl heading into contests in Louisiana, Washington, Nebraska, Maine, Virginia, Maryland, the District of Columbia, Wisconsin and Hawaii later this month. Whatever his successes, his audacity of hope image may take a battering in coming months...

Will Super Tuesday be transformational and “get America going again” (in the words of John F. Kennedy)? The conventional wisdom of the moment among political pundits is that Americans are crying for change. Voters are fed up and disappointed and want to be able to look at themselves in the mirror and feel that the President they choose to rule the world is honest, ethical and moral. Most of this hope is reposed in Barack Obama. His uprightness, appeal to the high road of ideals, flights of poetry...