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.

1. Germany’s version of universal healthcare has existed for 125 years
2. The majority of German patients are happy with the healthcare system the way it is
3. The system is financed not by the Government but by the workers and their employers
4. Germany has a 99.8% coverage of its 82.3 million people
5. Children are completely covered until they are 18

The first part of the German series is just under 9 minutes long so please do go to NPR to listen to it because as soon as I listen to the other recordings, I will post the relevant data here. One of the biggest arguments I have heard against universal healthcare in the USA is that any such system might cause huge waits and a shortage of doctors however this is apparently another conservative rumor because according to the OECD: Germany and the USA have the same number of doctors per 1000 people. Germany beats the USA in specialists with 2.4 per 1000 people compared to the USA’s 1.7.

NPR have also developed a nifty health comparison tool which allows anyone to compare the health system in the USA to other European countries. The fact is that the healthcare system in the United States is in trouble and the best way to fix that system would be to learn from countries like Germany who have been using universal healthcare for the last 125 years and made it work.

The last major argument is about freedom of choice, the German’s have a great term for their support of universal healthcare called Solidarität (solidarity). In America we have a phrase: ” United we stand.” Why does that phrase only extend to national security? Why not healthcare? German society has stood together to support every person for the benefit of the entire country why is that impossible in America? I would like to believe it is not impossible and with an Obama presidency, it can be done.

In 1964, King was invited by Willy Brandt - then mayor of West Berlin - to speak at a commemoration ceremony for the slain JFK. The adoration of West Germans was not enough; King insisted on crossing into East Berlin, where he "preached a sermon of non-violence and universal brotherhood to an overflow crowd in the Marienkirche". Despite having his passport - as well as his German translator and guide - confiscated by the American embassy, King came through a seemingly unbreachable divide, transcending the implacable politics of the Cold War.

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The speech was Obama at his best in a presentational sense. Almost every line drew applause. Now I can look at the content and be sceptical of such puffery as ridding the world of nuclear weapons and wanting Jews and Arab to work together, but as a candidate he can get away with such stuff. I do still wonder how he will go in office (ih he wins) when he has to actually make a tough decision.

But if he wins, it is clear he will be an extraordinarily popular United States President globally. And while they don’t vote, it will be refreshing to have a President who has global popularity. It may benefit both the US and Obama’s presidency.

But the flipside is the curse of expectations. When those tough decisions do confront Obama, and he does do something which is unpopular globally - the backlash may be even worse as people could feel a sense of betrayal.

Obama is only 4% ahead of McCain, but he will well ahead in the electoral college vote, and he is receiving twice as much coverage as McCain. This is arguably the result of an uncritical gushy media, but I can’t see it changing.

The speech was not as flamboyant as I expected however I was impressed as always, mainly when Senator Obama indicated he was a citizen of the world. Many liberals like myself will admit to that, especially those who have spent some time traveling and living overseas however, unsurprisingly, Rush Limbaugh was the first person to jump on the comment:

I’m growing weary of Democrats and their presidential candidates finding something wrong with being an American citizen

I think this is a systemic problem with some conservatives, they really think that liberals/progressives/democrats are not proud to be American. I will grant you that some of us are not proud to be American but that lack of pride only exists because of the actions of the current administration. If every person loved his or her country completely then we might be veering into “borg” territory. If you don’t know who the borg are, I urge you to watch some Star Trek, it is a great show.

The simple fact that some Democrats disagree with America or express their shame for the direction the country has taken is what makes America so great. My friends (Ireland and Mass.) and I realize that we have a greater duty beyond country, it is a duty to have a positive impact on the world. If everyone endeavored to improve the world within their own country as well as outside, we would truly have a world approaching the proverbial utopia.

Senator’s Obama speech hit on two points that are critical and reflect why I continue to support him:

1. He admits that under President Bush, America has lost the respect of the world and needs to regain it.
2. We are all citizens of the world and need to work together to improve this world and tackle the issues that affect everyone in every country.

Some of the Senator’s points are echoed in a report released this month by the Phoenix Initiative, a group of prominent scholars and policy analysts:

The next president of the United States must forge a new national security strategy in a world marked by enormous tumult and change at a time when America’s international standing and strategic position are at an historic nadir. Many of our allies question our motives and methods; our enemies doubt American rhetoric and resolve. Now, more than at any time since the late 1940s, it is vital to chart a new direction for America’s global role.

Please do read the whole report if  you have time, they touch on some important issues for the next President. I know some of you do not agree with the Senator but perhaps you might agree with some of the points he made in his speech?

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).

Among his other 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 (PublicAffairs, 2007)

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)

Obama's journey - taking in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel (and the Palestinian West Bank), Jordan, Germany, France and Britain - was also a high-risk attempt to seize one of Senator John McCain's strongest weapons. McCain argues that Obama is woefully short of international experience, and the polls suggest that a large majority of Americans agree with him.

A one-to-many message

The European leg of the trip has been reported, both in Europe and in the United States, largely in terms of the probability that if elected Obama will be a more popular United States president in Europe than George W Bush. That would not be hard.

In fact, the whole tour - in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Jordan and in Israel, as well as in Berlin, Paris and London - was plotted and planned with immense care by Obama's enormous foreign-policy staff. (He has a foreign policy team of 300 advisers, split into some twenty regional or issue teams.) Care was needed. Obama had to steer his way through the hazards with all the mastery of a Tiger Woods.

Obama has to convince many different audiences at once. The primary target - as it must be - is those American voters who are not sure he can be trusted with America's international relations. Another audience is European politicians, genuinely uncertain whether he will be elected president on 4 November 2008, and anxious to learn what to expect of him if he is.

There are others Obama is obliged to try to reach. He seeks to reassure the pro-American forces in Afghanistan that he will not abandon them, that indeed he regards Afghanistan as a more urgent theatre of conflict for America than Iraq. In Europe he stressed that he wants more Nato allies to send troops to Afghanistan. He needs to persuade the government and the military in Pakistan that he understands the sensitivities of the porous Afghan-Pakistan border.

In Iraq, he tried and he may have succeeded, in showing that his conception of a planned US troop withdrawal is not just irresponsible pandering to American liberals, but is actually more in line with what the Nouri al-Maliki government wants than Senator McCain's willingness to keep a massive America army of occupation in Iraq more or less indefinitely.

In Europe he chose to make is one big public address at the Tiergarten in Berlin, rather than London. This was not, as hypersensitive British editorial writers feared, because he thinks Germany is more important to America than Britain, though it is possible that he does.

It was because he and his advisers wanted his speech to be shown alongside clips of John Kennedy's Ich bin ein Berliner speech (26 June 1963) and Ronald Reagan calling on Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall" (12 June 1987). The stratagem worked perfectly. Obama succeeded in presenting himself in the company of the two presidents generally perceived in America as the masters of international relations.

Obama was only away for a week. The tour was a indeed a brilliant success. But it is too early to be sure that it has worked in its primary purpose: to persuade middle America that "national security" would be safe in his hands.

Senator McCain, having patronised Obama for inexperience in foreign policy, is now accusing him of something close to dereliction of duty for leaving the country for a week. Indeed for all his proven resilience of character and his engaging wit, McCain is beginning to sound both ungracious and more than a little desperate.

That does not necessarily mean that Obama's journey has disposed of popular doubts about his ability to take charge of America's national-security policy.

If McCain's credentials include dropping bombs on Hanoi and then behaving with heroic courage as a prisoner there for more than five years, Obama's life-experience includes a similar period of time in childhood spent in a modest household in Jakarta, capital of the world's most populous Muslim nation. That might be thought to equip with him a certain useful insight into one of the most difficult problems America faces, namely the hostility of many Muslims.

A change in the weather

The comparison illuminates a reality that, like so much in American politics, is obscured by euphemism and evasive language. When Americans tell pollsters and reporters, as many of them do, that they are not sure that Obama is the man to trust with national security, there are many ways of parsing that opinion.

"National security" is often a synonym for "defence", which in turn is a euphemism for "military". Obviously, if national security is seen as essentially a matter of maintaining America's military strength, then McCain - a war hero, a bomber-pilot, the son and grandson of admirals, educated at the US naval academy and a member of the armed-forces committee of the Senate - ticks all the boxes.

If national security is seen in those terms, as it certainly is by many of those who doubt Obama's fitness to be commander-in-chief, he has little to show for himself in his curriculum vitae. A Kenyan father and an Indonesian stepfather, an American mother who devoted her life to helping people in the developing world, an autobiography that reveals deep insights into how the United States looks from outside: these are not bankable assets in political terms. For many, they are debits.

True, Obama has been a member of the Senate foreign-relations committee since he came to Washington in late 2004. It is revealing that McCain's (admittedly longer) service on the armed-services committee is thought to count as relevant experience, but Obama's time on foreign relations is not usually thought worthy of mention by journalists assessing his fitness to be president.

Obama calls for change, and there could be no greater sign of change in American political instincts than a victory for him in November. Yet increasingly the feeling is that he is not just preaching change. He may also have detected a change that has already taken place.

If you listen carefully to what he is saying, he is not repeating the standard liberal package offered by a Walter ("Fritz") Mondale or a John Kerry. He is advocating policies that are in the interests of the United States as well as of the rest of the world. In his Berlin speech, he called for policies that did not insult and upset the rest of the world, but that would be good for America too.

He has not wavered in his opposition to the Iraq war, but - faced with the (probably exaggerated) relief in Washington that George W Bush's "surge" has been successful - he has continued to call for American withdrawal, in the name, not of leftwing principle, but of Iraqi democracy.

He has resolutely supported the campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan. He has also started to insist that the European members of Nato, especially Germany, should put their soldiers where their mouth is. He has walked through the fire in the middle east without being fatally burned.

Middle America may not yet be ready for the experiment. But it does look as if, in a single week's intercontinental barnstorming, Obama may at least have deprived McCain of the argument that his opponent does not understand the world beyond the oceans.