Obama's best veep choice

June 12, 2008 Shuddering, lurching and stumbling, the 2008 general election has finally, mercifully begun. For a year and a half, U.S. voters have been flogged like a prison gang through the nine circles of media hell. The two dazed survivors of the primary process, John McCain and Barack Obama, are now warily circling each other, looking for an opening even as they try to shed the already hardened public perception of their character and motivation.
For disaffected Republicans as well as many Democrats like me, McCain is an irascible grandstander of slippery ideology who has made a career out of flattering and courting the media. It remains debatable whether McCain's traumatic experiences as a prisoner of war have enhanced or distorted his admittedly wide-ranging knowledge of military and security matters. Crystal clear, however, is McCain's startling awkwardness as a public speaker. With stilted, stodgy intonations that seem to descend from the late-19th century era of one-room schoolhouses, McCain laboriously reading a speech is a painful spectacle. After the mumbling, disjointed George W. Bush, doesn't the U.S. deserve a more sophisticated leader on the international stage?

Meanwhile, conservative talk radio, which I have been following with interest for almost 20 years, has become a tornado alley of hallucinatory holograms of Obama. He's a Marxist! A radical leftist! A hater of America! He's "not that bright"; he can't talk without a teleprompter. He knows nothing and has done less. His wife is a raging mass of anti-white racism. It's gotten to the point that I can hardly listen to my favorite shows, which were once both informative and entertaining. The hackneyed repetition is numbing and tedious, and the overt character assassination is ethically indefensible. Talk radio will lose its broad audience if it continues on this nakedly partisan path.

As an Obama supporter, I of course see things quite differently. Whatever his tactical assertions in the primary trenches, Obama seems to have an open and flexible mind. He is a conciliator and synthesizer, ready to give due respect to opposing views -- a grace desperately needed in paralyzed Washington. When the camera comes close -- as it did last week when CNN's terrific Candy Crowley tenaciously grilled him about Hillary Clinton's prospects for the vice-presidency -- his deliberative thought process is plainly visible. What a deft performance under high-stakes pressure: Obama was firm, authoritative and methodical without ever losing his warmth and geniality. The guy is smart as a whip. And his administration will be as good as its appointments. As for Michelle Obama, she is formidable, representing a bold, stylish feminism more authentically contemporary than the old, bellyaching, blame-the-males style of Hillary's omnipresent cheerleader, Gloria Steinem.

Given the looming importance of national security concerns, I used to think that Virginia's pugnacious junior senator, Jim Webb, an ex-Marine, would be Obama's most prudent running mate. Obama doesn't need some veteran pol like the 66-year-old governor of Ohio, Ted Strickland, who would simply make Obama look younger than he is. Arizona's ebullient Governor Janet Napolitano would certainly fill out my Italian-American dream ticket and help to nail down the Southwest. But I've come to feel that Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius is Obama's best bet. She is a polished public presence who epitomizes that cordial, smoothly reassuring, and blandly generic WASPiness that has persistently defined the American power structure in business and government and that has weirdly resisted wave after wave of immigration since the mid-19th century. An Obama-Sebelius pairing would be visually vibrant and radiant, like a new day dawning.
Hillary for veep? Are you mad? What party nominee worth his salt would chain himself to a traveling circus like the Bill and Hillary Show? If the sulky bearded lady wasn't biting the new president’s leg, the oafish carnival barker would be sending in the clowns to lure all the young ladies into back-of-the-tent sword-swallowing. It would be a seamy orgy of scheming and screwing. Hillary could never be content with second place. But neither could an alpha male like Obama. The vice-president should be an accomplished but subordinate personality. An Obama-Hillary ticket might tickle party regulars, but it would be a big fat minus in the general election. Republicans have shrewdly stockpiled a mammoth arsenal of past scandals to strafe Hillary with. Only a sentimental masochist would want to relive the tawdry 1990s.
I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised at the ecstatic media lockstep praising Hillary's so-called concession speech last weekend. This is the same herd of sheep who bleated to Bush's beat and brought us the Iraq fiasco. I first heard the speech on the radio as I was driving back to Philadelphia from a family event in upstate New York. I was shocked and appalled at Hillary's inflammatory demagoguery, which was obviously intended to keep her candidacy alive through the August convention and beyond. The echo in the museum's marble entry hall gave the event an eerily retro quality, as if it were a 1930s fascist rally. Hillary's turgid, preachy rhythms were condescending and manipulative, and her climaxes were ear-splittingly strident. It was pure Evita, a cult of personality masquerading as populism. When I later saw the speech on TV, I was disgusted by how Hillary undercut her insultingly brief endorsement of Obama with a flat expression and cold, dead eyes. The only thing that got her blood racing was the blatantly stoked hysteria of her screeching worshipers.

OBAMA'S LINK WITH (OSAMA) WITH MUSLIM WORLD

This column will probably get Barack Obama in trouble, but that’s not my problem. I cannot tell a lie: Many Egyptians and other Arab Muslims really like him and hope that he wins the presidency.
I have had a chance to observe several U.S. elections from abroad, but it has been unusually revealing to be in Egypt as Barack Hussein Obama became the Democrats’ nominee for president of the United States.
While Obama, who was raised a Christian, is constantly assuring Americans that he is not a Muslim, Egyptians are amazed, excited and agog that America might elect a black man whose father’s family was of Muslim heritage. They don’t really understand Obama’s family tree, but what they do know is that if America — despite being attacked by Muslim militants on 9/11 — were to elect as its president some guy with the middle name “Hussein,” it would mark a sea change in America-Muslim world relations.
Every interview seems to end with the person I was interviewing asking me: “Now, can I ask you a question? Obama? Do you think they will let him win?” (It’s always “let him win” not just “win.”)
It would not be an exaggeration to say that the Democrats’ nomination of Obama as their candidate for president has done more to improve America’s image abroad — an image dented by the Iraq war, President Bush’s invocation of a post-9/11 “crusade,” Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay and the xenophobic opposition to Dubai Ports World managing U.S. harbors — than the entire Bush public diplomacy effort for seven years.
Of course, Egyptians still have their grievances with America, and will in the future no matter who is president — and we’ve got a few grievances with them, too. But every once in a while, America does something so radical, so out of the ordinary — something that old, encrusted, traditional societies like those in the Middle East could simply never imagine — that it revives America’s revolutionary “brand” overseas in a way that no diplomat could have designed or planned.
I just had dinner at a Nile-side restaurant with two Egyptian officials and a businessman, and one of them quoted one of his children as asking: “Could something like this ever happen in Egypt?” And the answer from everyone at the table was, of course, “no.” It couldn’t happen anywhere in this region. Could a Copt become president of Egypt? Not a chance. Could a Shiite become the leader of Saudi Arabia? Not in a hundred years. A Bahai president of Iran? In your dreams. Here, the past always buries the future, not the other way around.
These Egyptian officials were particularly excited about Obama’s nomination because it might mean that being labeled a “pro-American” reformer is no longer an insult here, as it has been in recent years. As one U.S. diplomat put it to me: Obama’s demeanor suggests to foreigners that he would not only listen to what they have to say but might even take it into account. They anticipate that a U.S. president who spent part of his life looking at America from the outside in — as John McCain did while a P.O.W. in Vietnam — will be much more attuned to global trends.
My colleague Michael Slackman, The Times’s bureau chief in Cairo, told me about a recent encounter he had with a worker at Cairo’s famed Blue Mosque: “Gamal Abdul Halem was sitting on a green carpet. When he saw we were Americans, he said: ‘Hillary-Obama tied?’ in thick, broken English. He told me that he lived in the Nile Delta, traveling two hours one way everyday to get to work, and still he found time to keep up with the race. He didn’t have anything to say bad about Hillary but felt that Obama would be much better because he is dark-skinned, like him, and because he has Muslim heritage. ‘For me and my family and friends, we want Obama,’ he said. ‘We all like what he is saying.’ ”
Yes, all of this Obama-mania is excessive and will inevitably be punctured should he win the presidency and start making tough calls or big mistakes. For now, though, what it reveals is how much many foreigners, after all the acrimony of the Bush years, still hunger for the “idea of America” — this open, optimistic, and, indeed, revolutionary, place so radically different from their own societies.
In his history of 19th-century America, “What Hath God Wrought,” Daniel Walker Howe quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson as telling a meeting of the Mercantile Library Association in 1844 that “America is the country of the future. It is a country of beginnings, of projects, of vast designs and expectations.”
That’s the America that got swallowed by the war on terrorism. And it’s the America that many people want back. I have no idea whether Obama will win in November. Whether he does or doesn’t, though, the mere fact of his nomination has done something very important. We’ve surprised ourselves and surprised the world and, in so doing, reminded everyone that we are still a country of new beginnings.

American candidates ignore Asia at their peril

Barack Obama and John McCain, the US presidential candidates, should understand better than most why Asia is important to any incumbent of the White House. Unlike former president George H. W. Bush, neither has been an envoy to Beijing, but each has at least spent time on Asian soil, Mr Obama as a schoolboy in Indonesia and Mr McCain as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
Those experiences will stand them in good stead. As home to more than half the world’s people and a large share of its conflicts, Asia has a way of mugging unwary US presidents.


Asia’s historical impact on the US has been more calamitous and bloody by far than anything Middle Eastern; think of the conflict with Japan during the second world war, the Korean war and Vietnam. Even today, the US is fighting one of its two big wars in Afghanistan in central Asia.
George W. Bush is only the latest president to start by underestimating Asia’s importance and taking a confrontational stance towards China. Like Bill Clinton, he later changed his tune and courted Beijing.
There is a danger that this pattern of early hostility and belated bridge-building will be repeated. It is no help that the Beijing Olympics, along with possible human rights protests and ugly displays of nationalism, are to be staged in August, shortly before the Democratic and Republican national conventions.
Whatever happens at the Olympics, neither Mr Obama nor Mr McCain can escape the significance of Asia’s rise for US voters. The Asia-Pacific region exerts more economic and strategic influence each time the US goes to the polls.
In the age of globalisation, it is of no use for US politicians to focus on the “domestic economy” as though it can be isolated from foreign influences. The mocking campaign statement by Hillary Clinton, Mr Obama’s Democratic former rival, that “we borrow money from the Chinese to buy oil from the Saudis” was a truism. The Chinese, after all, have money and the Saudis have oil.
In the midst of the credit crunch, the importance of Asia’s robust economic growth is particularly visible in the finance sector. Mergers, acquisitions and share offerings by companies in China, India and Australia have boosted the incomes of investment banks struggling in the US and Europe. Asian sovereign wealth funds have injected capital into western financial institutions.
Asia’s economic importance, however, goes deeper than that. With his eye on the US electoral calendar, Joseph Quinlan,chief market strategist for Bank of America, this month begged US politicians to recognise how interdependent the US economy is with the rest of the world and urged them not to turn to trade protectionism. “America’s dependence on such critical inputs as foreign labour, resources, capital and markets has never been greater,” he wrote.
As for security, there is no doubt that China in particular is rapidly increasing the power of its armed forces. Lieutenant-General Ma Xiaotian, deputy chief of the general staff of the People’s Liberation Army, was evidently dreaming of a balance of superpowers when he told the annual Asian security meeting of the International Institute for Strategic Studies: “Peace is a product of parity, an equivalence of power and a balance of offensive and defensive strength.” For all his diplomatic fumbling, the second President Bush was right to call China a “strategic competitor”.
Even those who doubt China’s ability to match US military strength before decades have passed understand the risks of conflict and need for co-operation. Both Condoleeza Rice and Robert Gates, US secretaries of state and defence respectively, have gone on the record in recent days to defend close US engagement with China and the rest of Asia. “Asia has become the centre of gravity in a rapidly globalising world,” Mr Gates told the IISS meeting.
So far neither of the two main candidates has said much about Asia policy in a campaign dominated by the economy and Iraq. US business leaders, fearing the populist anti-China rhetoric that marked the early phase of the Democratic contest, hope it stays that way. But it has not escaped them that Mr Obama is the worst offender. He has accused China of currency manipulation and opposes a trade deal with South Korea.


The free-trader Mr McCain, by contrast, noted in an opinion piece with Senator Joseph Lieberman for The Wall Street Journal that the tripling of US trade with Asia in 15 years had created American jobs as well as Asian wealth. The US, they wrote, had common interests with China that could be the basis of a “strong partnership” on climate change, trade and nuclear proliferation.
US presidential hopefuls should openly celebrate the US relationship with Asia, not hide behind a screen of spurious economic nationalism for the sake of a few blue-collar votes. Since the 1970s, Asia and the US have contributed immeasurably to each other’s well-being. Only a foolish president would put that at risk.