Le Nouvel Observateur
Thursday 06 March 2008
Never has an American presidential election awoken as much interest in the United States and the rest of the world. And only rarely have the Democratic primaries delivered as much suspense. We could have believed that it was all settled, but Hillary Clinton has just recovered her luster after a discouraging moment. In what ever more resembles a race against the clock, with its close calls and head-to-head sprints, Hillary Clinton has recovered speed, even though she remains mathematically behind Obama.
Moreover, the suspense could last right to the end, if neither candidate succeeds in outstripping the other between now and the Democratic convention. In that case, the final decision will belong to 796 super-delegates, important Democratic Party personalities. Unless, as Hillary has proposed, an Obama-Clinton or Clinton-Obama ticket were possible.
Another reason for this election's fascination: the designated Republican Party candidate, John McCain, is an outsider, a man hated by his own party's rightwing, by fundamentalists notably because he had the courage to denounce recourse to torture.
According to the newsweekly New Republic, during George Bush's term, "McCain was the most effective advocate of the Democratic agenda in Washington. In health care, McCain co-sponsored, with John Edwards and Ted Kennedy, a patients' bill of rights. He joined Chuck Schumer to sponsor one bill allowing the re-importation of prescription drugs and another permitting wider sale of generic alternatives."
This strange configuration, a courageous outsider on the Republican side and two good Democratic candidates, provides hope that George Bush's two calamitous terms could be followed by the United States' international renaissance. America's image is at its lowest point. In December 2007, a poll showed that the United States remains eminently unpopular.
When asked what country or "entity" represented the greatest threat to world stability, Canadians, Italian, Turks, and Chinese did not answer bin Laden, but the United States! So Washington would be more dangerous than the "Axis of Evil" countries? Not unequivocally, since Americans themselves share that opinion. Now, in the present, particularly anxiety-producing state of the globe, the world, like the USA, is more concerned than ever about stability. That's the break from the past these three candidates - each so very different from the other - promise.
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Jean-Marcel Bouguereau is editor-in-chief of the "Nouvel Observateur." He is also an editorialist at the "Republique des Pyrenees," for which this article was written.
Now, "Real" Politics
By Mario Roy
La Presse
Thursday 06 March 2008
Since Tuesday night, half the gigantic American political machine, the part John McCain pilots, has entered into the "real" campaign, the race for the presidency itself. Yesterday in Washington, George W. Bush sort of passed the Republican torch to Senator McCain; the outgoing president - rather despised, as everyone knows - drawing rather embarrassing questions about the role he expects to play in the campaign of his potential successor.
Over the next seven weeks at least, this situation will generate an asymmetrical confrontation. The two candidates for the Democratic nomination, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, will have to continue to tear one another apart: they remain head to head, Clinton having broken a cruel string of defeats and won victories in Texas, Ohio and Rhode Island. The next big state to decide is Pennsylvania on April 22.
But if, at the end of this process, it should prove necessary to entrust the verdict to the 796 Democratic super-delegates, this bizarre campaign will last until August 25, when the national convention opens in Denver (Colorado).
However, "real" politics will not wait for that Tuesday to come onstage.
Like power, politics has neither color nor gender. And these last few days have been marked by the first woman and the first African-American likely to occupy the Oval Office imparting a more political tone to their respective campaigns. For the moment, it's Hillary Clinton who has won at this game. Her television advertising (when something's happening in the world "who will answer the phone in the White House at 3 a.m.?") has obviously scored some points.
We've also seen a discomfited Barack Obama for the first time. And that, notably, by a rather ambiguous epiphenomenon of Canadian origin: a leak that indicated that the candidate does not intend to reopen NAFTA, contrary to what he proclaims in public. The affair presents a cynical and populist Obama who not only uses double-speak, but would also play on Americans' latent protectionism (Clinton does so also).
The obvious goal of taking aim at the North American Free Trade Agreement would be to seduce the Ohio electorate particularly.
The state is both an industrial and an agricultural one which is deemed to have suffered from the opening of commercial borders with Canada and Mexico: eight Ohio Democratic voters out of nine believe that NAFTA is destroying them. Now, in real life, factories have, in fact, closed and 225,000 jobs have been lost since 2001, but it is unlikely they jumped to the other side of the Canadian border. On the other hand, Canada and Mexico buy over 50 percent of Ohio's exports, fostering 275,000 jobs in this state which has seen its GNP increase 10 percent between 2004 and 2006.
One sees all the complexity of the issue as well as the potential for demagoguery it offers "real" politics, the kind that will dominate the scene from now on.
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