The first hot topic of the evening was former Vice President and Nobel prize winner Al Gore's speech. Much of the conversation surrounded the odd choice of “Let the Sunshine In” as Gore's entrance and exit music. From Trinidad, georgiap quipped:

Brazilian danielduende was also amused by the choice:

Kenyan afromusing, live-tweeting the DNC, says:

Canadian doshdosh remarks upon Obama's campaign strategies during the DNC:

As the clock nears 10:00 EST, Danish-Puerto Rican solanasaurus sends word from the DNC:

Just prior to Obama's entrance, Trinidadian nplaughlin queries:

Driving the message home that the U.S. election has truly become global, Taiwanese tweeter leonardchien remarks:

Anyway hopefully a NZ TV station will show the series here at some stage, now it has been nominated for a staggering 23 Emmies. I reckon it will win many of them also.

1. 1932 DNC - FDR
2. 1964 RNC - Barry Goldwater
3. 1968 DNC - Chicago anti war riots
4. 1948 DNC - Hubert Humphrey in favour of racial integration, leading to Dixiecrats walkout
5. 1976 RNC - Ronald Reagan impromptu speech
6. 1980 DNC - Ted Kennedy speech
7. 1960 DNC - JFK acceptance speech
8. 2004 DNC - Barack Obama
9. 1992 RNC - Pat Buchanan with his culture war speech
10. 1896 DNC - William Jennings Bryan giving a rousing speech arguing against the gold standard

Interesting that most of them are not speechs by the winner, but by others. I suspect the Ted Kennedy speech at the 2008 DNC convention could become historic (and I say this not liking Kennedy). With Obama seen by many as an heir to JFK, a speech by the last surviving brother will have significance. And the reality that Ted Kennnedy is dying, this will be his last convention, and with his death will go that generation of the Kennedys. I suspect it will be very raw and powerful.

Bloggers of all stripes have moved passed their initial gut reactions on the freshly minted Democratic ticket and have started to formulate more solid opinions based on fact. That’s what covering politics is all about, isn’t it?

“On the surface, Barack Obama’s choice of Joe Biden as his Vice Presidential running mate strikes me as pretty uninspired,” writes Tim Dunlop from Australia. “It’s hard to imagine that it wins him an extra vote come November, though I think that sometimes the ability of a running mate to do that for any candidate is overstated.”

He continues:

Not that I think Biden is a bad choice per se; in fact, I don’t really think there is anyone better from the list of those whose names cropped up over the last few months. I certainly don’t think Hillary was ever a serious option. He is a fairly personable guy, even if he, rightly, has a reputation for talking to much. He is a regular on US political programs and has developed a solid presence in that medium, a bit of go-to guy for the cable shows looking for an articulate criticism of Bush policy.

Does “articulate critic of Bush policy” translate into “attack dog”? For Sultan Knish and the stories behind the news from Israel, that answer is an emphatic yes. However, there is one caveat.

One interpretation is that Biden is there to launch the dirty attacks on McCain that Obama doesn't want to dirty himself with. This is plausible considering that Obama's dirty campaigns have been fought by lawyers, people who worked for his campaign… But considering that Biden turned a simple question about what law school he went to into an extended rant about how high his IQ is, setting him loose as an attack dog is a plan that's right up there with sending a pyromaniac to light a torch.

I'm sure that Biden will serve as an attack dog, I'm also sure that he'll do most of the damage to his own side, delivering verbal broadsides that roll like grenades back into Obama's tent.

With Obama’s choice, the Jewish blogger DovBear wonders where the hope mantra went:

I don't see how you can talk credibly about change, and youth, and so forth when your running mate is a grizzled, old career Washington insider…

Then there is the experience gap. Does highlighting Biden’s three decades of Senate experience call attention to Obama’s inexperience? Batya from Shiloh Musings in Israel points out filling the VP spot with an experienced poltico appears to be a pattern in American politics when the lead role goes to a newcomer.

• John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson
• Bush and Cheney

Those two quickly came to mind.

I just wonder if anyone really believed that Obama would get the nomination so easily. The man really has no experience, no track record. Sort of frightening.

Then there are Biden's scandals and gaffes: His plagarism, his missed votes in the Senate, the famous foot-in-mouth disease. “So to recap,” opinesNorth Coast Voices in Australia. “Joe Biden is your typical candidate.”


He massages his personal history by ‘borrowing' the words and personal anecdotes of another, where possible avoids mentioning the real extent of his income, rewrites political history, turns up in the Senate when he wants to and generally tries to throw his weight around.

In other words - a 26-year political job horse who now relies on a wing and a prayer to get by in the U.S. Congress.
Definitely not the statesman with sound judgment praised by Obama in Springfield - more like the usual pitcher of warm spit.

A choice which offers little hope of change to the rest of the world.

But let’s leave Biden the man, or Biden the politician on the stump for a moment, and investigate where Biden has made his name: foreign policy. In this category we have a passel of posts that could easily be titled: Joe, what have you done for me lately?

From Erkan’s Field Diary, Biden may well bring an anti-Turkey stance to the White House.

An anti-Turkish vice president according to Hürriyet. He is known to defend Armenian, Greek, Cyprus lobby theses. But Foreign Policy experts state that Turkey is already changing is foreign policy attitudes and there won't much new tension btw Turkey and US….

Biden is also a “prime Serb hater and Albanian Muslim lobbyist” for sponsoring the 1999 resolution for the U.S. to bomb Serbia and, later, recognizing the Kosovo State, according to this 2007 post from Byzantine Blog that was recently reprinted in the German blog Allah’s Willing Executioners.

Iraq Pundit worries about Biden’s and Obama’s “total disregard for the Iraqi people.”

All along, Biden has made it clear that he sees Iraqis as nothing more than savages bent on killing one another. His solution is to divide the country to stop the beasts from murdering the other beasts. He can argue all he wants that President Bush and John McCain are not nearly as smart as Biden is, but at least they will not abandon the Iraqis.

A “100% Palestinian” blogger writing in Sabbah Blog, claims that Israel must be happy with Obama’s pick.

The guy (Obama) is ignorant and naive when it comes to cases such as Israeli occupation of Palestine. And now he picks a guy who proudly says “I’m a Zionist. You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist!” So, what are you expecting from Obama if he’s in office? (not that the other puppet is better).

Joe Biden chairs the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, a post that Obama hopes will compensate for his own lack of experience in the global realm. Obama “safe choice” will also help him win the most important part of all USA elections, AIPAC support - the Zionist Lobby.

One good piece of news coming out of the choice of Biden: He is big fan of the Amtrak train line, Dove’s Eye View informs us. For those who have tried to ride the rails in the U.S., that is not a bad thing at all.

Unfortunately I do not like Biden so much because he is with the crazy idea to divide Iraq based on religion and ethnics ,yes turning it to hundred pieces !!

I just want to ask how Iraq used to live all that time in piece before the Americans and I am not speaking about the Saddam era but beyond it.

On the other hand in the other camp there is a talk that McCain will choose Mitt Romney as vice , it is not yet confirmed but it was leaked to the Time magazine. Also Joseph Liberman’s name is circulating too.  McCain was under fire lately because of the number of his houses in which he can’t remember !!

By the way here is another nice photo gallery for Obama’s family in Time.com

Also there is a nice historical slideshow if you want to learn more about the United States history concerning its worst vice presidents.

I should seize this opportunity and remind you that in the last 26 years we have not got a Vice President ,Mubarak has not chosen one yet after all those years !!

Image source : Time magazine and Getty images

Real issues and deep divisions were at stake. The choice between Smith and McAdoo highlighted the oldest and bitterest division in the Democratic Party: the urban, immigrant politics of Tammany Hall and the other big city machines versus the solid, racially intransigent south. Davis emerged as a pure compromise candidate. He had moved far from his West Virginia roots to become a super-successful New York lawyer, founder of the blue-chip Wall Street firm, Davis Polk. He was to appear 140 times before the Supreme Court, once as counsel for the defence of segregation in the great civil-rights case of Brown v School Board. His credentials, however, were no defence against a landslide defeat in 1924 to the incumbent Calvin Coolidge.

The balance of the ticket

It has been many long years since the presidential nomination in either major party has genuinely been at stake on the convention floor, though sometimes the possibility of a surprise candidate emerging at the last minute has spiced the convention; such a frisson was felt when Edward Kennedy was thought to be about to challenge Jimmy Carter in 1980, or that Ronald Reagan would seize the nomination from the incumbent president, Gerald Ford, in 1976. More usually, the party's choice has been determined before the convention meets.

Godfrey Hodgson was director of the Reuters' Foundation Programme at Oxford University, and before that the Observer's correspondent in the United States and foreign editor of the Independent. He reported the presidential elections of 1964, 1968, 1972, and 1976 for various British and American media, and was co-author (with Lewis Chester and Bruce Page) of the best-selling account of the 1968 campaign, An American Melodrama (Viking Press, 1969).As more and more states have adopted primary elections or caucus systems that involve so many voters that they can be seen as virtual primaries, one candidate arrives at the convention with an unassailable majority. This year was different, in so far as the race through the primaries and caucuses left Hillary Clinton close enough to Barack Obama that some of her supporters dreamed of carrying her challenge to the convention floor. But in the end the two candidates and their supporters were sufficiently impressed by John McCain's strength that they realised that if they did not hang together, the party would hang separately.

The convention is not without importance. It brings together the party faithful, both elected officials and backstage operators, in their thousands. The intense discussions, in the convention hall and in hotel bars and suites as well, shapes the mood of the party and influences strategy for the final run up to election day. And it has become the custom for the candidate to choose his vice-presidential running-mate at least before the convention is over.

The historical experience of the vice-presidency has been the opposite of that of the convention. The first of Franklin D Roosevelt's four vice-presidents, John Nance ("Cactus Jack") Garner from Uvalde, out in arid west Texas, said the office was "not worth a pitcher of warm piss". (The saying has usually been bowdlerised to make the comparison with "warm spit", but Garner himself said anyone who believed that was what he said was "a pantywaist", a Texas expression for the effeminate.)

Since 2001 the US has had a vice-president, Dick Cheney, whose relationship with President George W Bush is widely believed to be that of a ventriloquist and is dummy. Sidney Blumenthal has written of Cheney's conduct of the office that it amounts to an "imperial vice-presidency".

Certainly Cheney and his powerful chief-of-staff, David Addington, are known to have been behind many of the most important and (to many) most offensive of the George W Bush administration's policies. They pushed for a definition of the rights of "enemy combatants" captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere that stripped them of all the cherished protections of American law. They pushed, too, for the use of torture on suspected terrorists, and worked assiduously to define torture so as to permit techniques of interrogation, such as "waterboarding" (simulated drowning) that have always been regarded as torture.

Among Godfrey Hodgson's books are The World Turned Right Side Up: a history of the conservative ascendancy in America (Houghton Mifflin, 1996); The Gentleman from New York: Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (Houghton Mifflin, 2000); More Equal Than Others: America from Nixon to the New Century (Princeton University Press, 2006), and A Great and Godly Adventure:The Pilgrims and the Myth of the First Thanksgiving (PublicAffiars, 2007)One reason why the significance of the vice-presidency cannot be dismissed as airily as Garner did is because presidents do die in office; and two such deaths in the last sixty years have reminded Americans that the vice-president stands, as the cliché goes, "a heartbeat away from the presidency".

No one can pretend that it was unimportant that Theodore Roosevelt succeeded William McKinley when he was assassinated in 1900 (rather than Garret Augustus Hobart, McKinley's first vice-president); that Harry Truman (and not Garner, or the notably leftwing Henry Wallace), succeeded FDR, let alone that John Kennedy was replaced by Lyndon Baines Johnson.

As Dick Cheney has understood, the increased importance of the vice-presidency does not only lie in the fact that the vice-president must take over if a president dies in office. Since the Dwight D Eisenhower administration (1953-61), when the elderly president used his eager-beaver vice-president, Richard Nixon, to do a lot of foreign travel in his place, overworked presidents have made a constant effort to find useful work for their vice-presidents.

This process reached perhaps its highest point before Cheney in the relationship between Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Clinton gave Gore important assignments, including responsibility for ambitious ideas of government reform, to an exceptionally well-qualified vice-president; indeed, Gore would have taken over the White House had it not been for the close and disputed 2000 presidential election, with its Florida "hanging chads" and supreme-court dénouement.

Even before he (and until now it has always been a "he") takes over a greater or lesser share of the president's load, however, most modern vice-presidents have performed another vital service. They have "balanced the ticket". Jack Kennedy, for example, would not have become president had Lyndon Johnson not brought the solid south into line.

The flight of the balloons

The choice of a vice-president is critical both for Barack Obama and for John McCain. In what still looks like being a very close election, each candidate needs to consider, in choosing a deputy, how that choice can strengthen his electoral prospects with sections of the electorate.
Among Godfrey Hodgson's recent openDemocracy articles on American politics:

"The United States election: time for ‘change'" (10 January 2008)

"America's change election: reality or mirage?" (11 February 2008)

"'Superdelegates' and the US election" (25 February 2008)

"The lost election year" (15 May 2008)

"Barack Obama: at the crossroads of victory" (11 June 2008)

"A game of two halves" (15 July 2008)

"Barack Obama's political tour" (28 July 2008)
Obama is aware that he has not succeeded in convincing many white working- class men that he can be trusted with national security; and voters of that kind are numerous in states, such as Ohio and Pennsylvania, that will be critical for him if he is to win a majority in the electoral college. McCain, too, has a problem that can be at least partially fixed by the right vice-presidential choice. He is old. If elected, he will be the oldest president to take the oath of office. He needs a young vice-president. If he can find one who will also reassure those "movement conservatives" who are still not convinced - in spite of McCain's many moves toward conservative positions in the course of the campaign - so much the better.

The candidates will not be chosen at the conventions. Nor will the vice-presidential candidates, though the extent to which they are genuinely welcomed and acclaimed by the parties in convention assembled, red, white and blue balloons and patriotic rhetoric both duly inflated - will have their due effect on the campaign.

And still...things can get out of hand.

In Atlantic City, in 1964, Lyndon Johnson planned a coronation for Hubert Humphrey, and ritual humiliation for Robert Kennedy. His plans were upstaged by the angry effort of the (mostly African-American) Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) to crash the convention. The MFDP's contingent was led by its combative spokesperson, Fannie Lou Hamer, who pulled up her dress to show where she had been whipped. The ensuing disruption took the nation years to forget.

Four years later, in Chicago, demonstrators against the Vietnam war took over the streets of the Windy City, and mayor Richard J Daley sent his police in to beat them and throw them through plate-glass windows. The watching television audience took note of Daley's arrogant rage, even if they could not lip-read whether what he said to Senator Abraham Ribicoffwas just an honest "fuck off", or whether he added an anti-Semitic epithet for good measure. But the way Chicago 1968 got out of hand certainly contributed to the Republican victory later that year.

So, who the parties choose for the second place in the ticket matters a lot more than it used to. And watch the conventions when the balloons - red, white, blue and metaphorical - go up. Remember Chicago, and Atlantic City, and the Cow Palace in San Francisco in 1964, where the star of Barry Goldwater sank below the horizon, and the star of Ronald Reagan and the new conservative ascendancy first rose into the sky.

(E)xpanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold war era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.

More recently, Henry Kissinger, proponent of NATO expansion to include the states of Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe, warned against further NATO expansion:

Confrontational rhetoric notwithstanding, Russia's leaders are conscious of their strategic limitations. Indeed, I would characterize Russian policy under Putin as driven in a quest for a reliable strategic partner, with America being the preferred choice ... But the movement of the Western security system from the Elbe River to the approaches to Moscow brings home Russia's decline in a way bound to generate a Russian emotion that will inhibit the solution of all other issues. It should be kept on the table without forcing the issue to determine the possibilities of making progress on other issues.

First, a word about my use of the terms “Pan-Africa” and “Pan-Africanism.” The Pan-Africa I am referring to here is the one that builds on the ideological consciousness of the global historical experiences and identities of people of African descent, and others who share that ideology for political and solidarity purposes. It is a Pan-Africanist consciousness that draws from DuBois’s hope, back in 1897, that if Africans were to be a factor in the history of the world, it would have to be through a Pan-African movement. Thus when Ghana became independent from Britain in 1957, Du Bois, unable to attend the epochal occasion due to his passport being impounded by the US government, handed over the mantle of the Pan-Africanist movement to Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, through a letter that he wrote and had delivered to Nkrumah.

The 1966 military coup that overthrew Nkrumah as Ghana’s president dealt a big blow to a Pan-Africanist movement that had achieved a great deal for people of African descent, especially in Africa. The shared African identity and global consciousness spawned by Pan-Africanist ideology played a key role in mobilizing support amongst African and Third World regions in overthrowing colonialism. In the United States, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King both looked up to the Pan-African world for solidarity in overcoming American racism. With Nkrumah gone, the ideals of Pan-Africanism began atrophying, to the extent that in the 21st century today there is no discernible movement that concerns itself with the problems that afflict Africa and people of African descent around the world. But there is no question that such a movement is as necessary today as it was in the 1950s and 60s.

In his autobiography Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama has demonstrated his awareness of both a Pan-Africanist and Third World consciousness, but for the nationalist demands of American politics today, he has not made that awareness a part of his campaign platform. But those who know Obama’s autobiographical instincts in guiding his best judgments know that his upbringing and struggle to identify himself are a core part of who he is. And it is his autobiographical narrative that has appealed to people around the globe. Thus while heeding the call to be cautious in speculating what a possible Obama presidency might do for the Pan-African world, it is worth discussing the extent to which Obama’s narrative in itself has the potential to influence new visions and energies in the study of the Pan-African world and its future prospects. Those energies have been on display in many places around the world, not least in Kenya, where Obama’s father came from.

A June 5th editorial in The Daily Nation of Kenya, where Obama’s father, a Harvard Ph.D., hailed from, offered three reasons as to why Africans were celebrating Obama’s victory. The first reason had to do with Obama being “the first African American ever to win nomination to vie for the presidency of the world’s sole super-power.” Second, Obama was considered “a son of Africa” who has excelled in the world. And thirdly, Obama was “a son of Kenya,” since Obama traced “his roots” back to his fatherland, Kenya, in “the present-day Siaya District.” The three reasons culminated into one huge hope: Africans were hopeful that “with this win, ‘their son’ will implement Africa-friendly policies that could uplift the continent from poverty.”

In the June 8th edition of The Sunday Times of Rwanda, columnist Frank Kagabo also reflected Obama’s blood connection to Africa, observing that Obama had “relatives living in third world poverty,” a fact which would help African people feel “good and know that nothing is impossible no matter where you come from.” In the Malawian parliament, The Daily Times quoted opposition Malawi Congress Party member of parliament Boniface Kadzamira as congratulating Senator Obama, paraphrasing the parliamentarian as saying Malawi was “likely to benefit if he wins the presidential election this August” [sic]. Hon. Kadzamira was also quoted offering a snippet of how Obama’s foreign policy might look like “He says he is likely to move away from the policies of sanctions, which has hurt countries like Zimbabwe, to negotiation. He says he will have tough aid conditions and will move away from the weapons of mass destruction to mass reconstruction”.

The Harvard University-based blog aggregating project, Global Voices Online, housed in the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, has been culling blog commentary on the American elections from outside the United States, on a website called Voices Without Votes. Amongst the blogs the website is aggregating is [url=The World Wants Obama Coalition]http://www.theworldwantsobama.org[/url], from where a link to the [url=Caribbean World News]http://www.caribbeanworldnews.com/middle_top_news_detail.php?mid=869[/url]announced a news item titled “Caribbean United Behind Obama”. Another linked blog, Global Mania, sported the self-description, “Because the world believes in real change, too.” A round up of Kenyan bloggers by Global Voices author Rebecca Wanjiku was titled “Kenyan bloggers on Kenya’s most famous son, Barack Obama”.

But even amidst the hopes, adulations and expectations for what a “son of Africa” in the American White House could do for the continent, there have also been voices cautioning the hyped praise, and posing some searching questions. The Daily Nation’s editorial mentioned above asked: “But what is there for Africa in the American elections?” It went further still, asking: would Obama manage to “overcome the strong lobby groups that control American foreign policy and that have very little time for Africa?” More unflattering commentary came from Rasna Warah, writing in the June 9th edition of The Daily Nation, who wielded a sharp knife over the blood ties everyone was happy to evoke. Warah’s title was upfront and blunt: “We cannot lay claims on Obama; he’s not one of us”. Warah went on to state: “What everyone seems to be forgetting is that Barack Obama is an American, not a Kenyan. His roots may lie in Kenya, but he was born and raised in the United States, and his loyalty lies with that nation, not with ours.”

As evidence for her argument, Warah cited Obama’s own words spoken when he visited Kenya as a United States Senator, in August of 2006. She quoted Obama as saying: “As a US Senator, my country and other nations have an obligation and self-interest in being full partners with Kenya and Africa. And I will do my part to shape an intelligent foreign policy that promotes peace and prosperity.” As for Obama’s autobiography Dreams From my Father, which Obama wrote after returning from Kenya and going to Harvard Law School, Warah suggested that “curiosity about his roots” was the real reason Obama visited his fatherland for the first time ever, in the summer of 1988. It was “not deep love for this country,” said Warah.

By far the most authoritative statement of caution if not negation came from Dr. Makau Mutua, Dean and University Distinguished Professor of Law at State University of New York at Buffalo, and chair of the Kenyan Human Rights Commission. Writing in the Daily Nation of June 5th, Dr. Mutua started out by quipping that the reaction to Obama’s clinching of the Democratic nomination was as if Obama was “poised to become” the president of Kenya, or indeed Africa. The reasons, Dr. Mutua said, were three-fold: “national, racial, and ethnic pride that a black man can become ‘king’ of the empire.” Dr. Mutua then set out to demolish the expectations edifice by pointing out “the nature of the US as a state, and the character of the American presidency” as the reasons why he was urging caution to the hype of what Obama would do for the continent. Dr. Mutua contrasted between the way Africans and Americans see the office of the president as being responsible for the mounting expectations on Obama. “Africans think of presidents as omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent”, wrote Dr. Mutua, saying that in Africa that perception gave the president enormous powers which ultimately determined what citizens could gain or lose. It was what created what Dr. Mutua called “tribal barons.” Not so with American politics, in which “the American presidency is a highly circumscribed office that is subject to larger national interests on which there is consensus about the purpose of government.”

What would prevent a President Obama from being helpful to Africa then were the two core functions of the American presidency: to “develop and implement a foreign policy to enhance US interests and pursue a domestic policy that will bring economic prosperity to the nation.” It was in the service of those two functions that America’s role in the world had been historically shaped, and continued to be, limiting the scope of what an individual president could do, even as he or she brought his or her personality and individuality to what is considered the most powerful leadership position in the world. Here Dr. Mutua went deeper than anybody has been daring to, to expose America as an empire whose wealth and might have been built on a foundation that has dialectically entailed the exploitation and destruction of Africa. “Why am I pessimistic about the prospects of an Obama presidency for Africa?” asked Dr. Mutua. The answer, he offered, lay in America’s “structurally racist and exploitative relationship with Africa. In slavery – the brutal capture, transportation, sale and exploitation of Africans to build America – and the support by the United States of Cold War despots in Africa, lies the destructive relationship between black people and America.”

As an analytical insight, Dr. Mutua’s explanation went to the heart of a historical truth that has largely been avoided by most commentators, including Obama’s own positioning of himself vis-a-viz his identity. “It is partly because of these traumas,” explained Dr. Mutua, “that Africa is so underdeveloped and marginalised in global politics. That is why to America Africa has either been an afterthought or an object of pity and charity. It would require an ideological shift by the US to change its relationship with Africa to base it on equality, fair trade and investment, and a voice for Africans in global institutions.” As such, no individual American president can achieve the kind of paradigm shift that would turn around America’s image of Africa: “These are not steps that a president can take alone because they affect fundamental American interests, and would call for a realignment of US foreign policy so that it is not simply Eurocentric.”

Dr. Mutua’s realistic analysis of what the American presidency looks like and how its foreign and domestic policy mandates shape the scope and limits of what the American presidency can achieve points to an important distinction that has to be made between the president as an individual and the president as an institution. As an individual, we only have to hark back to Obama’s autobiography, Dreams From My Father. As I pointed out in my recent blog article on Obama the personal importance of Africa to Barack Obama is not only evident in the book, it is profound to Obama’s own identity. The way Obama treats Kenya in Dreams From My Father leaves us in no doubt about this. In the book, Obama takes 450 pages to offer an intimate look into his life, from early days in Hawaii, Indonesia, Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago, to an epochal homecoming in Kenya. The amount of detail Obama dedicates to his life in the United States and Indonesia, where he lived all his life hitherto, contrasts sharply with the one third of the book that he devotes to Kenya, where he only spent three months. His days at Harvard Law School are given a mere two sentences (p. 437).

Contrary to Rasna Warah’s suggestion that Obama went to Kenya more out of curiosity than love of the country, the answer to Obama’s deep search for identity is finally consummated and revealed in Kenya, right from the moment he steps foot on the soil. It is worth reproducing, again, the paragraph that puts Obama’s quest for identity to rest, when somebody recognizes his name in an instant:

“That had never happened before, I realized; not in Hawaii, not in Indonesia, not in L.A., or New York or Chicago. For the first time in my life, I felt the comfort, the firmness of identity that a name might provide, how it could carry an entire history in other people’s memories, so that they might nod and say knowingly, ‘Oh, you are so and so’s son.’ No one here in Kenya would ask how to spell my name, or mangle it with an unfamiliar tongue. My name belonged and so I belonged, drawn into a web of relationships, alliances and grudges that I did not yet understand” (p. 305).

However the reasons for caution in imagining what an Obama presidency may do for Africa and the Third World are equally sobering. By the time we get to the US senate and to his next book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (2006), Africa has pretty much disappeared from Obama’s narrative, replaced by distant references that characterize much of mainstream Western attitudes about Africa. Missing even from the Index, Africa is mentioned only perfunctorily, no longer as the place Obama spent a lifetime yearning for, but rather as the known poster child for the world’s worst maladies and disorder. “There are times when considering the plight of Africa—the millions racked by AIDS, the constant droughts and famines, the dictatorships, the pervasive corruption, the brutality of twelve-year-old guerillas who know nothing but war wielding machetes or AK-47s—I find myself plunged into cynicism and despair” (p. 319). But Obama is also aware of the progress Africa has made, citing Uganda’s success with the AIDS pandemic, and the end of civil war in countries like Mozambique. He observes that “there are positive trends in Africa often hidden in the news of despair, while at the same time clinging to an Afropessimism that warns: “We should not expect to help Africa if Africa ultimately proves unwilling to help itself” (ibid.).

Obama is also able to go beyond the average politician in his candidness about the ravages brought on Indonesia and other parts of the world by the ideological juggernaut of US foreign policy. In a chapter titled “The World Beyond Our Borders,” Obama dwells on how Indonesians find it puzzling that “most Americans can’t locate Indonesia on a map,” given the role that US foreign policy has played in the fate of Indonesia “for the past 60 years” (p. 272). Providing a brief historical account of this role, Obama describes how the CIA provided “covert support to various insurgencies inside Indonesia, and cultivated close links with Indonesia’s military officers, many of whom had been trained in the United States” (p. 273). The military then went ahead and “began a massive purge of communists and their sympathizers,” leading somewhere between 500,000 and one million deaths, “with 750,000 others imprisoned or forced into exile” (ibid.).

Obama’s candor continues throughout the chapter, noting that “our record is mixed—not just in Indonesia but across the world” (p. 280). He calls American foreign policy “a jumble of warring impulses,” at times farsighted and serving the mutual interests of both the United States and other nations, and at other times making “for a more dangerous world” (ibid.). His take on Iran ought to be enlightening in light of the current saber-rattling and familiar drum beat toward another a possible military strike: “Occasionally, U.S. covert operations would engineer the removal of democratically elected leaders in countries like—with seismic repercussions that haunt us to this day” (p. 286). Yet Obama is no dogmatic ideologue, finding himself “in the curious position of defending aspects of Reagan’s worldview” in debates with friends on the left. He charges that progressives were eager to indict US complicity in the brutalities that took place in Chile, yet were less so in criticizing oppression in the communist bloc. Nor was he persuaded that US corporations and global trade “were single-handedly responsible for poverty around the world; nobody forced corrupt leaders in Third World countries to steal from their people” (p. 289).

Needless to say, such candor is as rare amongst US politicians as is knowledge of what US foreign policy has been up to around the world, in the general populace, according to several writers and thinkers, including John Perkins, Gore Vidal, Noam Chomsky, Carl Mirra, Stephen Hiatt, amongst others. Many of these thinkers have also pointed out how while some Third World leaders are indeed corrupt, Western multinational corporations, backed by a deliberate, strategic foreign policy, create the very infrastructure that facilitates the corruption, and are actually corrupt themselves. According to Perkins, Hiatt, Patrick Bond, John Christiansen, Amit Basole, Leonce Ndikumana, James Boyce, among others, this is done through debt ensnaring, off-shore tax havens, trade mispricing, and dubious advice from the IMF and the World Bank, whose complicity with foreign policy and multinational corporate interests has led to trillions of dollars being emptied out of Third World countries and poured into Western economies. This is the corruption and the looting of the Third World that has best been captured by John Perkins’ term “corporatocracy” in his 2004 book Confessions of an Economic Hitman. Stephen Hiatt’s 2007 edited collection of essays, A Game As Old As Empire shows how pervasive the nexus of economic hitmen has become, and how closely aligned the system is between foreign policy and corporate interests.

In the final analysis, the significance of an Obama presidency for Pan-Africa and the Third World will lie less in what Barack Obama may or may not be able to do for people of African descent than in the symbolic message that his ascendancy to the most powerful office in the world will do in changing black people’s perceptions of who they are in the world, and how others view them. That has been the underlying, implicit cause of the renewed hope in what has been said by the Kenyans, the Malawians, the South Africans, the Nigerians, Caribbean commentators, and in fact every one else around the world who has joined in the celebration. While the office of the US presidency may limit Obama’s actual impact on Pan-Africa and the Third World, as Dr. Mutua warns, the symbolic importance of the achievement is what has the potential to go much further in offering a paradigm shift in the self-perception of a people whose destiny, according to Frantz Fanon, represents the possibility to refashion a new vision for the world, one beyond the limits set by European rationality and the consequences, both good and bad, that the Third World has reaped there from.

For that to happen, Obama’s own notion of what race and racism still mean in today’s America and how some minorities are overcoming it could shine some light on the path this transformation might take. Obama devotes a chapter in The Audacity of Hope to the topic of race, in which he offers both a stinging and sensitive portrayal of the bane of America’s ethnic identity, as well as the prospects of what can be achieved in breaking down racial barriers. Obama’s philosophy of race indict residual and institutional racism, but also celebrate white people and black people alike who are able to overcome the vice and chart a new path for society. Those lessons ought to apply not only to America, but to the rest of the world as well, in the apt description of the global face of Obama’s extended family as a miniature portrait of the world:

“As the child of a black man and a white woman, someone who was born in the racial melting pot of Hawaii, with a sister who’s half Indonesian but who’s usually mistaken for Mexican or Puerto Rican, and a brother-in-law and a niece of Chinese descent, with some blood relatives who resemble Margaret Thatcher and others who could pass for Bernie Mac, so that family get-togethers over Christmas take on the appearance of a UN General Assembly meeting, I’ve never had the option of restricting my loyalties on the basis of race, or measuring my worth on the basis of tribe” (p. 231).

*Steve Sharra is a visiting assistant professor, Peace and Justice Studies, Dept. of Philosophy, Michigan State University. This essay was first prepared for the “The Meaning and Implications of the Obama Phenomenon symposium” held by the Zeleza Post (www.zeleza.com).

“Once, a black nanny took me out across the road to a parapet above a rail track beside [seemingly Kalk Bay] harbor. “You wouldn’t want me to drop you,” she said.
The fear I felt lingered. I returned recently to measure how far I would have fallen. In memory, the abyss plunged 100 feet. Reality revealed a drop of 10. That discrepancy measures a child’s panic.”

I did not make that up.
I had forgotten about Cohen until I read a piece in the New York Review of Books on how Kofi Annan should get the bulk of the credit for the Kenyan peace process as, with few exceptions, Kenyan politicians were selfish. (Separately The Christian Science Monitor, credited a larger cast of characters.) The piece also tried to lay to rest Annan’s failed leadership of the UN during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
What stood out in the piece, however, you guessed it was how Cohen used the Kenyan crisis to include an obligatory Obama reference. Instead of learning something from his Kenya experience or about Obama, Cohen comes with his own answers. For example, when he rejects the insights of Obama’s sister, Auma, who lives in Kenya that the post-election violence was not “tribal” or an ethnic thing, but the consequence of a lack of democracy and the inequitable distribution of resources. Even worse is this “insight” on Obama:

His American birth had allowed Barack Obama to escape [the tribalism that .. earlier this year plunged Kenya into its worst post- independence crisis]. Nobody cared about circumcision in Hawaii or Cambridge or Chicago.

And the white tribalism in the US?

Let me say that I harbor no resentment over the actions of Israel's leaders. For more than 60 years, they have knowingly made their country a pariah in the Arab and Islamic worlds, just as the Palestinians have made themselves pariahs in much of the West. This is, of course, the right of both parties, but neither seems to want to face the consequences of their decisions. With demographic realities and increasingly radical, well-armed Arabs making them panicky about Israel's security, Israel's leaders naturally to try to lock down as much U.S. support as possible. Having consciously – if unwisely – put all their eggs in the U.S. basket since the 1973 War, Israel's leaders must do everything possible to protect their relationship with Washington.

The U.S. invasion of Iraq, it seems, was not enough for the Israel-firsters. Now, according to Sen. Joseph Lieberman, a U.S.-launched war on Iran is needed because “the threat that the U.S. and Israel face from the Islamic Republic of Iran is today greater than ever.” Though based on the fantasy that Ahmedinejad's tin-pot regime is a threat to the world's only superpower, this is a perfectly commonsense position for Israel and its U.S.-citizen backers in AIPAC to champion. In their view, U.S. wars with Muslims are the ultimate good for Israel. Recall, if you will, the perfectly accurate April 2008, words of Benjamin Netanyahu, likely Israel's next prime minister: “We [Israel] are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the twin towers and the Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq.” These wars, Netanyahu said, have “swung American public opinion in our favor.” How much more must Netanyahu and AIPAC believe that a U.S. war with Iran would add to this “swing” in Israel's favor?

My own anger falls not on Israel, then, or on Palestine, for that matter; as I have written elsewhere, America would do just fine and would be better off without either or both. It falls rather on the lobbying efforts of AIPAC, that organization's blatant purchasing of fealty from U.S. politicians in both parties, and the media's obsequious parroting of specious canards about “Israel's right to exist” and “the duty of Americans to support an island of democracy in the Middle East.”

While few would question the right of AIPAC leaders to lobby U.S. politicians, legally bribe them with campaign contributions, or limit their right to speak as they please in public, not matter how scurrilous or libelous their words, I sometimes wonder if Americans have focused on what AIPAC lobbies for and what its acolytes in politics and the media support.

It is a commonplace to say that lobbying is a pervasive activity in U.S. politics at all levels of government, especially at the federal level. People lobby for tax advantages for business or tax breaks for individuals; for the right to own guns or laws to ban them; for subsidies for agriculture or vouchers for private schools; for universal health care or smaller government. Across this diverse array of lobbyists there are two common threads: (A) None are working to push the United States to participate in other peoples' wars; and (B) All are arguing for things that will – from their perspective – improve America, whether by making it richer, better protected, more competently educated, healthier, freer, etc. The anti-gun lobby, for example, is no less confident than the NRA and its affiliates that they are working for the best interests of Americans. One or the other is wrong, but their activities are shaped by their perception of what is best for America.

It is this last point that separates the lobbyists working for and with AIPAC – most of whom are U.S. citizens – from almost all other U.S.-based lobbyists. AIPAC does not lobby, bribe, and libel to make Americans and America better off. It lobbies solely, forthrightly, and cynically to make Israel richer, better protected, and able to do as it pleases in its relations with Muslim states. AIPAC makes no pretense of doing things meant to benefit America; rather, its members take pride in seeking a goal that runs directly counter to the economic welfare and physical security of almost all other U.S citizens by seeking to keep them involved in a religious war in which no U.S. national interest is at stake.

Now, there are a few other similar anti-American lobbies – those for Armenia, Lebanon, Greece, etc. – but AIPAC is clearly primus inter pares in this dastardly group. And given that every AIPAC success is a net loss for U.S. security and the U.S. Treasury, it seems odd that our so-called political leaders take orders and funds from this fundamentally anti-U.S. organization. Odd or not, however, that is the reality. Senators Obama and McCain have become AIPAC poster boys, each strengthening his support for Israel over the course of the current presidential campaign. Obama's position, in fact, has changed so drastically in a pro-Israel direction that the Illinois senator appears to have no mind of his own on this issue. He has simply and obsequiously adopted the Democrats' traditional abject subservience to their small but powerful pro-Israel constituency.

McCain is an Israel-firster of the deepest hue. Coached by Joe Lieberman – who argues there is a U.S. duty to ensure God's promise to Abraham about Israel is kept – McCain is now considering Republican Congressman Eric Cantor for his running mate. Rep. Cantor, needless to say, is eager to spend American blood and treasure to secure Israel. Speaking in Israel, Cantor pushed the same false assertion that is the staple of U.S. leaders in both parties. “What befalls Jerusalem,” Cantor said, “threatens the security of the United States and its allies worldwide. That's because Jerusalem and Israel are Ground Zero in the global battle between tyranny and democracy, radicalism and moderation, terrorism and freedom.”

This, of course, is nonsense of a high order, and Lieberman and Cantor know it. Both men are committed to Israel as a religious idea, not because it has anything to do with U.S. security. According to Lieberman, “The rabbis say in the Talmud that a lot of rabbinic law is to put a fence around the Torah so you don't get near to violating it. Well, McCain has a series of very clear-headed policies toward terrorism and Islamic extremism [that put] extra layers behind his support for Israel.” He also told a conference of Christians United for Israel that he was pleased they recognized it was America's duty to defend Israel, blithely lying to them that “President Washington and the Founding Fathers” would support America fighting Israel's wars. Cantor, playing to both the Israel-firsters and their U.S. evangelical allies, also has made clear where his primary loyalty lies:

“Jerusalem is not merely the capital of Israel but the spiritual capital of Jews and Christians everywhere. It's the site of the First and Second Temples, which housed the Holy of Holies, and it's the direction in which we Jews face when we pray. This glorious City of David is bound to the Jewish people by an undeniable 3,000-year historical link.”

My own view is that if God promised Palestine to the Israelis, God is perfectly capable of keeping that promise, and America is no way committed to expend the lives of its soldier-children in a war over conflicting interpretations of God's word. The Israelis and the Muslims should be perfectly free to fight over whether Yahweh and Abraham or Allah and Mohammed are right, and Americans should be perfectly free to draw the correct conclusion, that the United States does not have a dog in this fight. In addition, there is a genuine constitutional question of church-state separation on this issue. Why should American taxpayers have their earnings and children's lives spent to defend a theocracy in Israel or, for that matter, to protect an Islamic theocracy in Saudi Arabia.? (Imagine the howls of protest and torrents of church-state separation rhetoric from the media and both parties if a congressman introduced a bill calling for the U.S. to designate that an amount equivalent to what's spent to protect Israel and Saudi Arabia be sent to the Vatican – a nation-state like Israel and Saudi Arabia – to improve its defenses against the now well-articulated threat from al-Qaeda and other Islamists.)

Objectively, three realities are clear: (1) U.S. survival is not at stake in the Israeli-Muslim war; (2) the taxes of Americans should not be spent to defend theocratic states; and (3) holy books are insane tools to use as guides for U.S. foreign policy. In America, however, these realities lie unspoken because of the lobbying efforts of AIPAC and the pro-Israel mantras of the politicians it purchases with campaign contributions and promises of media exposure, including McCain and Obama. By their consistent anti-American actions, AIPAC and the U.S. politicians who do its bidding have fully validated the words of the real George Washington – not the figment of Washington painted by Joe Lieberman. “Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence,” President Washington wrote in 1796, “the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.”