Sydney and US Presidential Primaries Heat Up
I woke up (a sleep-in I'll admit. It's Sunday!) at 9am this morning to a whopping 37 degrees. I must say that I can't ever remember waking up to heat that high so early. Welcome to climate change...The other big news is that Hillary Clinton (above left) has finally announced that she will be running for the US Presidantial election in 2008. The presidential primaries (the preselection process for the Democrats and Republicans) is going to be a star studded affair with some very big names throwing their hat in the ring including The New York Mayor during 9/11 Rudy Giuliani (pictured below) for the Republicans and high profile African American Barrack Obama (pictured above right) for the Democrats. Read who else here.
The attractiveness of a Clinton/Obama ticket must surely win. However, their preselection process is long and drawn out with many twists. It is surely one story to watch out for.
posted by Joel MacRae @ 9:40 am
8 comments
8 Comments:
Do you think that the fact Giuliani's a moderate will hurt or harm him? What about the fact that Hillary should be a Republican?
Is the Daily Show still on SBS? If not, you can get it here. They've been keeping an eye on how Fox "accidentally" writes 'Obama' in captions that are meant to say 'Osama'. There's even something about people accusing him of being a closet Muslim because he went to an Islamic school when he was growing up in Indonesia. (Obama is a Christian, but apparently doesn't attend church all that often.) Oh, and they're trying to get some mileage out of the fact that his middle name is Hussein. Sad really.
A Clinton/Obama ticket? Certainly Hillary wouldn't settle for second place and my American friends reckon that the only way Obama's likely to get in is as a vice president. (In the primaries everyone will be saying to themselves, 'We have to choose the most elegible. Even though I'm not racist, other people are. Therefore I have to vote for a white man.') But it's far from a sure thing. Hillary will disillusion many of the lefter Democrats, pushing them to vote Green. (A good thing in the long term!) And is too loathed by the average person to really pick up many swinging votes.
Looking at it at a superficial level, Hillary definitely fits the part of a President. But she is a hard-nosed populist centrist by the looks of some of the few things i have read.
Wow what a surprise Fox news is going to play dirty.
Hay Nick, whats you and your American friends say about JFK wannabe Jon Edwards?
Well of course we're impressed with the way he cuts through the bullshit. It must be difficult to balance humour with actual reporting of news, even asking the pollies harder questions than anyone else (some of them serious questions!).
I watch it religiously on the net. I think most of my friends do too. One guy in my logic class said that one of the best things about the Dems mid-term victory is that it made for such a funny episode of the Daily Show!
But if you're asking whether he'll do a Man of the Year then I really doubt that it would be possible to make that transition.
It's interesting that Obama has generated such excitement. Clearly it has a lot to do with his personal charisma. I think it also has a lot to do with a desparate yearning in the United States for a real leader, someone who wants to deal with long term systemic problems. Why don't we see that same yearning here? Is it because know one has stepped up to the plate to excite those passions? Or, being cynical, is everyone just more interested in their own mortgage and credit card repayments.
Sam,
I hope that Obama is generating genuine excitement in the US. However, the media in Australia seem to be focusing on the pure novelty of the fact that he is African American. This is a shame because I have seen the Oprah interview and he certainly is charismatic, although not like Clinton (pick either one).
I just had to share this quote from The Onion on Hillary - "The last thing America needs is a radical liberal who supports the war and the death penalty while opposing flag-burning and gay marriage."
As for the novelty of Obama as an African-American, I read this strange piece on Salon about how he's an African-American in the same way that some people are Italian-American etc. That is, his father was an immigrant from East Africa, he's not descended from West African slaves. The author finds this difference significant - 'At a minimum, it can't be assumed that a Nigerian cabdriver and a third-generation Harlemite have more in common than the fact a cop won't bother to make the distinction. They're both "black" as a matter of skin color and DNA, but only the Harlemite, for better or worse, is politically and culturally black, as we use the term.'
Today there's a reply (from a Eurasian) arguing that we shouldn't define cultures in racial terms. It's amazing how much the one-drop rule persists in the American psyche, there's very little talk of mixed-race individuals, it's always mixed-race couples. Oh, and occasionally they even use the word "miscegenation" when speaking!
All the talk about his racial background you have raised nick proves that its probably going to be a factor in his preselection, for better or worse. One has to remember that it is expected of a presidential candidate to 'carry' a state, usually a state held by the opposition. Can either Clinton or Obama do it? To win the Dem's have to win at least one red state, and guess what? They're all in the south.
Just did a quick search on the 2004 Presidential outcome. This site is awesome:
www.uselectionatlas.org
But the 2004 Presidential map proves my point that all the seats where a black candidate might be a negative issue (the south) are dominated by Republicans.
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