3 Responses to “Defeatists and Pessimists”

1. John Locke, on May 10th, 2008 at 8:03 pm Said:

   This issue reminds me of 2004 when the Guardian newspaper in an act of hubris encouraged its readers to write to Americans in Ohio pleading with them to vote for John Kerry and spare the wider world four more years of Bush. Quite rightly the Americans that received the letters made their irritation known at the prospect of a foreign newspaper trying to influence their election.
   With Obama we have a similar situation, his election would he hugely popular abroad but as you say, how would his campaign illustrate this fact without causing major problems? Richard Nixon would have had a field day.
   John McCain talks of repairing alliances and working with other nations, and apart from depicting McCain as a continuation of Bush and offering a fresh start that’s really all Obama can say as well. Maybe Obama can try and invent some sort of subliminal campaigning as a way to avoid saying ‘vote for me the Brits, the French and the Iranians will love it.’
   Andrew Sullivan hopes America has grown tired of divisive strategies and such ploys will not work this time around. I hope he’s right. But how Obama would frame the discourse on this issue without appearing as a foreign policy deus ex machina and avoid the inevitable charge of arrogance is a tough one.

2. masterleep, on May 11th, 2008 at 8:21 am Said:

   Are there any particular changes to our current system of democracy that you think would improve matters?

3. conradg, on May 11th, 2008 at 7:29 pm Said:

   It will be interesting to see if Obama can reframe this issue to his advantage. It’s certainly not impossible, but it requires selling Obama as someone whose foreign poliby will take a very different track than the Bush-McCain approach. On second thought, maybe this isn’t so hard as it might seem, and something we shouldn’t be so pessimistic about. How about a foreign policy that creates friends and allies, rather than one that loses them? Can xenophobia be so strong as to reject that?

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