This article was written for a very volatile American audience at gather.com. Machiavelli readers might find it interesting but it is sure to stir things up at gather.
We should all be thankful Hillary Clintons victory in the latest Democratic primary puts he back in the race to be the partys candidate in the U.S. Presidential election. I am no fan of Hillary, but the prospect of Barak Obama taking on the Republican cheat-machine was positively frightening. Win or lose, Obama could spell disaster.
Though the Republicans are close to an all time low poll rating thanks to the disastrous Bush presidency with its penchant for war, mismanagement of the economy, use of fear and panic to distract voters from truly important issues like climate change and the general miasma of sleaze that always surrounds governments of the right, the GOP are still potent political operators. Against such opponents it is doubtful whether a black man could win a Presidential election.
On top of that, Barak Obama is a candidate to strike fear into the hearts of civilised nations outside America while filling the enemies of civilisation with glee. He may talk of dreams and visions as fervently as any hellfire and damnation evangelical preacher, but behind that he has no policies. I have been reading the mans utterances and we can distil his politics thus:
Healthcare: yeah well folks gotta take better care of themselves.
Employment: Its a good thing to have a job and earn your living.
Education: Im in favbour of it.
Abortion: This is an important issue, we gotta do something.
Immigration: Them spicks dont belong here.
Foreign Policy: You just got to take these stories about there being a world outside America with a pinch of salt.
Plans for America: Ill be a great President, I have a dream. Im gonna change things.
No doubt Obamas supporters will play the race card here and accuse me of being a white supremacist; that is one of the great dangers of Barak Obama. I am merely being an even handed political commentator with the perspective of an outsider. To elect a man President because the nation has been bullied into a mass guilt trip would be the greatest folly, much of Africa does not see Americas Black community as victims of slavery but its beneficiaries. How many Americans would be happy to drink water Elephants had pissed and dumped in? How many Americans have to subsist on nothing but maize porridge for weeks on end? How many Americans live in fear of having their villages burned because the neighbouring tribe are pissed off about something?
One of the things that damages the reputation of the USA in the perception of the wider world is the attitude that solutions to the problems of America can be applied to the whole world. That is just plain wrong.
After a rigged election in Kenya there has been an outbreak of inter tribal violence. Now some of the blame for this can be laid at the door of the British, as the former colonial power we created in Africa nation states on the European model, disregarding tribal issues. Consequently the Kikuyu, the most numerous and therefore the most powerful tribe in Kenya, dominate politics. The Masai resent this and feel their interests are not given equal consideration with those of the Kikuyu. This leads to accusations of racism but not in the black / white pattern of Europe and North America, but races in the sense of tribes that count their numbers in millions. Kenya with a population of 28 million has over 100 ethnic groups which means 100 languages and cultures.
The whole of Africa is dominated by tribal cultures and many tensions exist. The continent is probably the most racist place on earth but is not recognised as such because the racism is black against black. In casting himself as the heir of Martin Luther King, Barak Obama shows his inexperience, naivety and lack of qualification for a job that requires somebody who can interface with the whole world. When Kenya, a nation four fifths the size of Texas, can host so many ethnicities, so many ancient enmities and alliances, so much potential trouble, it is inadequate to embrace Luther Kings idiotic notion of black consciousness as if it is an umbrella under which all the members of the worlds myriad dark skinned races can unite. Americas problems are not the worlds problems but without a leader clued up on foreign affairs, the world’s problems quickly become America’s problems as the past eight years have shown.
Even though campaigning has barely begun Obama has already managed to piss off Europe, China, India, Russia and a few others with his attitude that the rest of the world will just have to do what America says.
Supporters of the U.S. rabid right will rant that the American election is nothing to do with outsiders. This is wrong, while having become the worlds only superpower by default, successive American governments have sought to impose themselves on the rest of the world. Thus who becomes President is everything to do with outsiders. The state of the U.S. economy is now so precarious that somebody who can bring about rapproachment with the nations whose trust has been lost in the Bush years is an absolute necessity in The White House.
Lets be glad then the Obama bandwagon is wobbling. Were the U.S. Democratic Party to make him their candidate it would only hand the election to a nutter like Romney or Huckabee, or worse, saddle the free world with a leaders more incompetent than George W. Bush.
Now read American ex-pat writer Lionel Shriver as she (yes, she) explains why Hillary Clinton should not be President.
None of this means a woman or a black man should be the Democratic candidate, just not this woman or black man.
Little Nicky Machiavelli 