The World from Down Under

By George Negus

One of Australia's most respected journalists turns his unflinching gaze to the big issues that affect us
George Negus is one of Australia's most respected journalists. As the host of SBS tV's Dateline, and in his earlier international programs Foreign Correspondent and 60 Minutes, George has traversed the world, meeting and interviewing politicians, philosophers, peace-brokers, philanthropists, presidents, princes and pundits. From Al Gore and Bob Geldof to Mikhail Gorbachev and Colonel Gaddafi, from the Dalai Lama and Desmond tutu to Naomi Wolf, Richard Branson and Cherie and tony Blair, the list of Negus interviewees is as varied as it is extraordinary. In tHE WORLD FROM DOWN UNDER George draws on his travels and his extensive journalistic experience to take on climate change, poverty, war, indigenous affairs, 9/11, the global financial crisis, China, race, religion, the role of women - and lighter stuff. Locking horns with the world's movers and shakers, he looks affectionately, if a bit sceptically, at how the land Down Under, its politics, its people and its culture fits - or doesn't fit - into the wider global scheme of things. In his earlier bestselling books tHE WORLD FROM ItALY and tHE WORLD FROM ISLAM, George gave us his unique 'Australian internationalist's perspective' on post-communism, the world game of football, God, the Muslim faith and even terrorism. Now, in the same easy, conversational, but provocative style via his 'chat with recent history' he unravels the world's big issues - the things that concern, perplex and provoke us all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Jan 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9780730493914

George Negus

George Negus is one of Australian television’s most respected journalists. He is the author of ACROSS THE RED UNKNOWN, BY GEORGE!, and the bestselling THE WORLD FROM ITALY and THE WORLD FROM ISLAM. George and his partner, Kirsty, and their two children live in Balmain, Sydney.

Book preview

PART ONE

POWER, POLITICS

AND IDEOLOGY

‘A young African-American Democrat in the White House is a different world!’

A Chilly Reception in Wintry Washington

The urban village of Georgetown over in the US is perched, picture postcard-like, on the winter-frozen waterfront of the meandering Potomac River. It’s also bang up against downtown Washington DC itself — the capital of what the bulk of the world’s people regard, quite rightly, as the richest and most powerful nation on Earth. That said, in more recent times, the powering Mandarins of pseudo-communist China might raise an increasingly confident brow at that sort of previously unarguable assessment of the US. Be assured, more on that later.

Meanwhile, let’s play tourist guide for a tick. If healthy daily exercise is your thing, if you’re a thoroughly modern fitness devotee, those famous sites that most visitors come to Washington to ogle and flash their digital cameras at — the White House, the Capitol Building, the Lincoln Memorial, the Smithsonian Institute — are all a mere energetic power-walk away.

But, for the more physically challenged among us, a less demanding stroll around pretty much mugger-free Georgetown is a pleasant enough way to wile away a few hours. With its lanes, quaint elderly architecture and the occasionally majestic home, it’s something of a familiar mélange of interestingly old-new residential areas back Down Under — say, the likes of Sydney’s Paddington or Balmain, Melbourne’s Carlton or South Yarra, Fremantle in WA or maybe even North Adelaide and Battery Point in Old Hobart Town.

You know the sort of joint — cute, self-consciously groovy neighbourhoods popular with the New Gentry for their fashionable high-end shops, smart cafes, bars and restaurants — not to mention the possibility of desirable real estate you hope you can afford.

At least until 2008, when Wall Street’s property-ignited crash pulled into line even the lofty financial aspirants among the country’s better-than-middle class professionals, prominent US figures in politics, the media, academia and the corporate world found themselves with enough greenbacks to reside in ‘this upper-bracket community’, as an itinerant British friend and willing part-time Washingtonian described Georgetown. Over a glass of half-decent shiraz in old-trendy Martin’s Tavern on the main village drag, Wisconsin Avenue, he told me: ‘You never know who you’re likely to bump into in Georgetown. Bill Clinton’s favourite Italian trattoria is just around the corner from where we are right now. It’s a case of spot Bill — and then spot the Secret Service agent keeping an eye on him.’

Indeed, ‘spot the political heavyweight’ is near enough to a Georgetown sport. To name just a handful, some of its current inhabitants include Senator John Kerry, the Democrat beaten by George W Bush in the 2005 US presidential race, Ben Bradlee, the famed former editor of The Washington Post, the Post’s celebrated ‘Watergate’ reporter, Bob Woodward, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright and the adroit Clinton spin-doctor, George Stephanopoulos. I spotted an admirably long-suffering John Kerry myself, breakfasting in the popular woody grill at the Georgetown Inn, besieged by overly zealous autograph hunters and unstoppable camera clowns.

Tongue-in-cheek cracks aside, Georgetown is actually one of your nattier, unpretentiously Ivy-league sorts of neighbourhoods — stylish, but not up itself; political, but certainly more Democrat than Republican! Don’t expect to see the likes of George Dubya or Dick Cheney meeting their mates from the Grand Ole Republican Party for a Budweiser at Martin’s Tavern or the Georgetown Inn. It’s not really their natural habitat.

Like its inner-urban counterparts in Australia, you would never be so crass as to call gentrified Georgetown a suburb! Back in the early 1900s, it apparently had its ups and downs and lost some of its post-colonial social and cultural gloss for a while. But, during the 1930s, it burst back to its former glory days, particularly when the iconic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt moved into the area. Roosevelt, you might recall, was the author of that agelessly ringing comment: ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.’ Old FDR would probably roll over in his grave if he heard the hardcore political currency some of his US presidential successors — and their Prime Ministerial mates from Down Under — more recently gave to FDR’s preferred salient word ‘fear’.

Indeed, whether we’re talking Down Under or even the world at large, ‘fear’ is a word that’s been belligerently and often irresponsibly hurled about right at the core of the contemporary political lexicon. Desperate politicians clearly see prodding nervous potential voters to feel it as a vote-winner. You have to wonder what the man himself, FDR, would make of the loaded gun-barrel idiom ‘the politics of fear’. I digress, but not without damned good reason.

Speaking of Presidents and Prime Ministers and ‘the politics of fear’, it was to the politically sophisticated location of Georgetown, Washington DC, that of all unlikely people, John Howard prompted me to travel in the northern winter of 2007. The weather there might have been chilly, but the issue was a hot one. Somehow or other, out of the blue, the Australian Prime Minister had gotten us, or at least himself, well and truly embroiled in American domestic politics — not a regular occurrence, even for someone who claims George W Bush as a personal friend and political ally. Indeed, Australian pollies deliberately involving themselves in the domestic politics of another country is something Howard had regularly railed against — when it suited him. On this occasion, with his buddy in worsening strife over Iraq and terrorism, that maxim was sent out the proverbial political window!

Mister 0.005% Versus Barack Obama!

When we landed in wintry Washington in mid-February, despite the fact that the US elections were still a whopping twenty months away, the leading contenders for the White House, from both sides of the country’s political spectrum, had already hit the campaign trail with a frantic vengeance. A couple of days into our stay, we pulled together a fascinating gathering at a great venue, a small group-catering operation in a private home known to the Georgetown cognoscenti as ‘The Secret Restaurant’.

It was a splendid dinner accompanied by equally splendid lubrication with a bunch of Washington ‘insiders’, senior correspondents and political analysts — two pro-Republican, two pro-Democrat, plus a couple of ‘free spirits’ like the author and his long-time friend and host for the evening, Martin Walker, the US Editor of United Press International. It was a highly vocal cross between ‘Politics in the City’ and ‘Dial-an-Opinion’, if you can imagine it. Not a shrinking violet at the table!

For a couple of edifying hours, we chewed the fat on America’s early excitement over their still-distant elections. Naturally, the collective carry-on had to include George Bush’s worsening quagmire in Iraq, the irritant of Iran and its unpronounceable leader Amadinejad and, impossible to ignore, the weirdly self-defeating Democrat in-fight between Hillary Clinton and the emerging ‘rock star’ on the US political scene, the African-American hopeful, Barack Obama. And, of course — how could you not raise it — the same Barack Obama versus his latest worst friend, John Winston Howard.

The opening shots from our private Washington think-tank were incredibly revealing, particularly for someone like Yours Truly, who’d already embarked on this tome aimed, as it is, at getting a realistic international perspective on, among other things, Down Under in the world.

‘I’d never have thought I would be coming here to talk to people like your good selves about Australia’s involvement in American politics,’ I told them. ‘But, how did you react to John Howard’s outburst that a vote for Barack Obama in the presidential election was a vote for Osama bin Laden, a vote for the terrorists.’

‘I couldn’t believe it,’ my forthright friend Martin Walker said. ‘I thought he was drunk.’ ‘He wasn’t drunk. I can guarantee you that,’ I felt obliged to interpose. Martin went on: ‘When I heard Prime Minister Howard intervened to say that a vote for Obama would be a vote for al-Qaeda, I just couldn’t believe my ears.’

‘He actually said he thought if he was al-Qaeda, he would be praying five times a day for an Obama victory and a Democrat victory,’ I said. ‘He thought Obama winning the Presidency would be a win for the terrorists.’

Eleanor Clift is the Newsweek White House correspondent. ‘Well,’ she chimed in, ‘people who pay any attention at all to the geo-political line-up would realise that President Bush has very few friends in the world — and Prime Minister Howard is one of them. Most Americans discount most of what President Bush says, so I don’t think that they took Prime Minister Howard’s comment as anything serious about the candidate Barack Obama.’

‘You can say that,’ I responded, ‘but would most Americans know that John Howard and George Bush were close?’ That was all that Stephen Wayne, Professor of Politics at Georgetown University, needed to get himself into our exchange in scarifyingly unequivocal terms. Get your perspective gene around his response to my inadvertently leading question.

‘Most Americans wouldn’t know John Howard,’ he retorted. Now, that’s quite a call, so I checked with him again. ‘Wouldn’t know who he was?’ I asked. ‘Would not,’ Stephen replied, even more adamantly.

‘You obviously watch the polls carefully, Stephen,’ I offered, ‘if you had done a poll before this stoush between Barack Obama and John Howard, what percentage of Americans do you think would know that John Howard was the Prime Minister of Australia?’ ‘Oh — maybe .005 percent,’ the Professor replied. ‘That many?’ I responded facetiously. ‘And how many now after his heavy comments about Obama and al-Qaeda? How many since then?’

Stephen’s reply — having had time to rethink his position if he wanted to — was also extremely telling. ‘Maybe one per cent!’ ‘Only one percent?’ I repeated his comment, a bit taken aback that such an eminent professor thought so triflingly few Americans would know or care who the Australian Prime Minister was.

When John Howard attacked Obama, the rising star of US politics, and Obama publicly reacted to his astounding jibe, for several days in print, on radio and television, their angry, politically charged contretemps got a lot of coverage in Australia and quite a bit in the US. Eleanor Clift had this to say about that: ‘All the coverage was couched saying that Howard was President Bush’s ally,’ she said. ‘Senator Obama came back saying that if the Australian Prime Minister was such a supporter of George Bush’s stand in Iraq, why doesn’t he ante up a few more troops. Obama said he was flattered to be singled out — and then the story passed.’

I asked one of our pro-Republicans, Peter Roff — a guy who’d worked as a political strategist to Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the US House of Representatives, a man who still fancies himself as a would-be Republican presidential candidate — what he made of this unexpected, highly unusual Howard-Obama slanging match? What did he think, for instance, of the Australian Prime Minister’s provocative comment that if Barack Obama were to be elected — or anyone from the Democrats, for that matter — and an early US exit policy from Iraq occurred, an exit ‘equals defeat for America’? Howard believed such an eventuation would be a catastrophe and that’s why there should never be a Democrat in the White House. ‘Do you agree with him, Peter’ I asked.

Peter had no doubt. ‘For that reason — and many other reasons!’ ‘But from a domestic standpoint, if you’re Barack Obama and you want to run with the big dogs, you might get some fleas. You want to run for President after having been a State senator in Illinois, you have to introduce yourself to the country. The fact that the leader of another country is so concerned about the possibility that you can win the election is just gravy for you.’

‘So are you saying that John Howard has done Obama a favour?’ I asked. ‘He’s done him a huge favour,’ was the Republican’s reply. ‘It vaults him head and shoulders above the others. They’ve been called dwarfs, pygmies — the Democrats that no-one has heard of like Joe Biden from Delaware, the Senator who stepped in it himself when he referred to Obama as the first clean black to run for President of the United States — whatever that means.’ Joe Biden, the Senator from Delaware, is now, of course, President Barack Obama’s Vice-President. Not bad for a political pygmy.

As Peter Roff, an unreconstructed, albeit jolly sort of American conservative, took a breath, the unreconstructed, acerbically sceptical Martin Walker grabbed another opportunity for some broad perspective. Perspective — that damned ‘p’ word again. ‘But, let’s not forget the curse of George Bush,’ Martin said. ‘Every single ally of George Bush has been politically doomed. Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, Aznar of Spain — they’ve all lost elections, Tony Blair is doomed in the UK. I think we’re probably counting out John Howard as a result of this one. Any friend of George Bush’s is on the way down.’

Yours Truly, back to the aid of the party: ‘John Howard’s line is that he is absolutely convinced that what George Bush is doing in Iraq is correct, so he’s going to support him to the political death.’ ‘Well,’ smirked Martin, ‘I’m not even sure Laura Bush is doing that.’

Lisa McCormack, another ‘apparent’ Republican conservative, but one of a strangely self-styled kind, was convinced that someone in the Bush White House had actually asked John Howard to put the boots into the rapidly ascending Obama.

Lisa thought that his verbal blast was ‘a great push for Obama. I mean, if I were Obama’s person, it would be just absolute gravy. Here is the Prime Minister of Australia attacking him.’ Why was that so useful to him? It wasn’t so much that their totally unpredictable stoush didn’t get much coverage, Americans were not ‘tuned in right now for the election’. ‘Except for junkies like us,’ Martin quipped. ‘Except for real political crack junkies,’ Lisa agreed.

Occasional bursts of frivolity aside, we were talking, no less, about the same John Howard who over the years, on high-minded principle had regularly railed against Australian politicians getting involved in the domestic policy of other countries. It was supposed to be a political and diplomatic golden rule. So what happened? Here he was blasting in personal and ideological terms the man who later turned out to be the Democratic Party presidential candidate — and eventually the US President. George Dubya’s ‘Man of Steel’, his ‘deputy sheriff’ in Asia, was also a self-proclaimed man of principle — except when the politics didn’t suit him.

In the long history of Australia’s friendly relations with our ‘great and powerful ally’ across the Pacific, think about the politically blasphemous things he laid on Obama that I’ve recorded in this piece and what has happened since then. Had John Howard remained Australian Prime Minister — instead of losing both the 2007 Australian election and his own seat — I don’t think I’d be the only ‘professional observer’ who would have wanted to be a proverbial fly-on-the-wall when the two men met for the first time in the White House. In fact, I for one would have been prepared to personally pay a large amount of my own money to be there when it happened. Seriously, it was outrageous stuff, massively offensive, totally out-of-line politically and an unprecedentedly low moment in US–Australian relations. And, of course, the former member for Bennelong was just trying to help out a mate, wasn’t he? How bloody Australian of him.

Then again, John Howard didn’t get on with Bill Clinton, another Democrat President, when they met in Washington after Howard’s election in 1996, so he was consistent in his prejudices.

I pointed out that, whatever else this unlikely fracas meant, it was the case that people back in Australia certainly now knew who Barack Obama was — the man John Howard said would play into the hands of Islamist terrorists, pull US troops out of Iraq almost immediately, which would amount to a humiliating defeat for America and a gigantic loss of faith in the eyes of the world. ‘But why would the Australian Prime Minister concern himself so early in the process with someone who really is just at the very beginning?’ Lisa commented.

As you might expect by now, Eleanor Clift went to bat for the up-and-coming Obama. Why would George Bush’s ally and friend John Howard take a stick to the high-flying Democrat contender, from across the Pacific in the geographically and politically remote Land Down Under? ‘Because,’ she said, ‘Barack Obama is a phenomenon not only in this country. He’s getting a lot of coverage in Europe and around the world. Most of the world doesn’t see him as a threat. Down the road, they see him as salvation.’

You’d have to say that John Howard’s intrusion into US politics was not the smartest thing he did in his twelve-year stint as the titular leader Down Under. But one positive did come out of it for John Howard. Starting, as it did, with his unseemly remarks on a drizzly, grey Sunday morning in early February 2007, a long-held aspiration of the incumbent Australian Prime Minister came to fruition.

As a result of a fairly innocuous studio interview with an old journalistic foil from the National Press Gallery in Parliament House Canberra, Americans finally got to know that his name was John Howard, not John Hunt — well, maybe one percent of them did!

Ballyhoo and Barack Who?

Well, almost two years precisely after my chance mile-high conversation about some US Senator from Chicago with, of all unlikely tipsters, Tim Fischer, the former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia, I found myself covering, via satellite, the glitz and ballyhoo of the Democrat’s 2008 National Convention. Would you believe it was actually being held at the Mile High gridiron football stadium in Denver, Colorado? Sometimes, coincidence can blow you right away! It can get horribly close to the non-faith-driven religion of we steadfast sceptics!

Anyway, as we know to our chagrin, US politics and in particular US presidential campaigns are completely over the top. They’re part Hollywood, part Washington, all spin and PR, but you can’t stop watching them. They’re infectious, especially if someone’s paying you to watch! Over There, party conventions make their counterparts Down Here look like Sunday school picnics on No-Doz. We frankly have nothing that compares with them. But, then again, would we want to? Their bullshit versus our boring is an invidious choice.

The Democrats in Denver voted for their ‘chosen one’, Barack Obama. A week later, the Republicans’ love-in for John McCain in Minneapolis-St Paul in Michigan was your foregone conclusion. These self-aggrandising US political party affairs are hugely welcome endgames of a protracted presidential process that’s far less like democracy and more like an endurance test for all concerned, even the media. The Yanks call this wacky process their ‘primaries’. Which begs the question, does that make the actual culmination of their painfully drawn-out two-ring circus, the vote for the country’s president, always held on the first Tuesday in November every four years, the ‘secondaries’? Just wondering.

Such as she is, US democracy is an incredibly strange beast! So much so that you can’t help at least pondering whether it is the appropriate prototype for a world that remains divided on the whole democratic ideal — or should that be democratic dilemma? The jury’s actually still out surely, considering the disastrous financial mess so-called American democratic capitalism recently got us into. Who knows, maybe a whole new, just, even more equitable democratic model is out there somewhere in the ideological ether. We can only hope.

Meanwhile, with Tim Fischer’s confident forecast on the plane to Albury ringing in my ears, I watched entranced as Barack Obama in Denver was eloquently gushing his way to power on a political wing and a prayer. His vast congregation of boldly religious Americans must have come closer to wishful thinking than an answered prayer. For many Americans, he was still something of a ‘great black hope’.

Earlier, as ‘the Obama factor’ was gaining momentum throughout an increasingly embarrassed, disgruntled US, fed up with George ‘Dubya’, the question niggling even Obama’s widening army of admirers was, is he more style than substance? Could he match the oratory, the rhetoric and the promises with action? Delivery, they knew, was a very different bag. Pushed to employ a modicum of depth and detail, Obama did eventually come up with a policy manifesto that — after the eight dark years of Bush — even many Republican Americans were wanting to hear: ‘Change we can believe in’, a line for the annals of history as political Pied Piper-like, he famously exhorted Americans on both sides of the country’s spit-through-thin ideological divide. In a nation where the divisive race issue is always only just below any surface, that card pretty much stayed in the pack — before Obama was elected. Since they elected him? Not really. But in his run-up to the White House, that race did not appear to be an issue was a major relief, a gigantic national breakthrough that resonated throughout the rest of the world.

But, on that historic day in August 2008 — unless you lived in a cave in Terra del Fuego, didn’t own a television set, didn’t listen to radio or only bought newspapers to light fires — you could not have failed to pick up that in Denver, Colorado, wildly excited US Democrats officially endorsed an African-American as their man for the White House. At the time, many Obama-ites feared that the droves of dangerously peeved devotees of his arch Democrat Party rival, Hillary Clinton, would be out there running obstruction. Despite the Obama euphoria and hype, it was still far from clear that the Democrats could run a united race. But, that same day in Denver was definitely Obama’s and the former American first lady herself gave him a rousing endorsement.

Awash with Genius to the Raving Stupid!

Any time you choose, invariably, the US is awash with political experts, from the genius variety to the raving stupid. But, for an on-the-spot chat at the Democrat song-and-dance routine in Denver, devoutly Mormon rather than devoutly Democrat, I hit upon a good one.

The Washington correspondent for the US publication The Nation, the idiosyncratic John Nichols, was eager to talk about how things were likely to unfold in the US over the final few months of an election campaign, the things that would impact tremendously on not just Americans, but also on the rest of us — meaning essentially the entire world. Post-Bush, a Democrat — of whatever ideological hue or racial origin — in the Oval Office of the White House would be a very different world — basically, an ‘ask questions now and maybe shoot later’ world, not a ‘shoot now and maybe never ask questions later’ world.

With Hillary Clinton and, by association, former President Bill Clinton no longer in the race, America’s two major Party candidates had been decided and the crazy dash to the White House was about to hot up. Indeed, as the septuagenarian Republican McCain and the candidate from another political planet, Obama, the forty-something Democrat, took up their free-range duel for the Presidency, in the ensuing months, the word ‘feverish’ looked quite calm and healthy.

The fact was that two disparately distant characters were vying for the world’s most powerful elected political position — McCain, an old-school right-wing Cold War warrior and Obama, an enigmatic sort-of new left future thinker. Not only that, but the stage they were acting on was a dramatically different global first. Ecologically and economically, the world was — still is — going through breathtakingly unfamiliar and testing times. Drastic change was in the air and thick on the ground. A lot like Australia earlier in November 2007, America had a clear national choice to make — a blast from the past or a political punt on the future. But, unlike Australia, theirs was also an internationally crucial gamble.

Somewhat surprisingly, Obama announced — including to an emotional, downcast, potentially divisive Hillary Clinton camp — the enigmatic Senator Joe Biden, an outspoken maverick, as his Vice-Presidential running mate. At the same time, not so surprisingly, Obama’s increasingly public and impressive spouse, Michelle, promised Americans that, if elected, her husband would be an ‘extraordinary president’.

With all the clamour and hoopla of ecstatic Democrats raging behind him in the red-festooned Mile High Stadium in Denver, I raised with man-on-the-spot, John Nichols, the rousing performance we’d both just witnessed.

‘You’re there in the flesh, John, but unfortunately we could only see it via satellite,’ I reminded him. ‘But was that white woman speaking with a forked tongue or is Hillary Clinton still a much tougher opponent for Barack Obama than John McCain?’ The worldly Nichols got the joking inference. ‘Well might she be a tougher opponent than John McCain, but she realises that Barack Obama has the nomination and she doesn’t want to be blamed for getting him defeated in November. So her speech tonight was a very good speech for Obama, full of endorsements and full of praise. But, it was also a very good speech for Hillary Clinton’s long-term political viability. She needs to be seen as a loyal, essential player in the Democratic Party. I think that with this speech she has achieved that.’

‘Help me with this, John,’ this quizzical Australian pleaded. ‘Almost thirty percent of Hillary’s supporters are actually saying that they won’t necessarily vote for Obama. Please explain that apparent display of political insanity to a simple Australian journalist. Do they want the enemy to win? Are they so upset at her not getting the candidature that they can switch to voting for the Republicans — voting for McCain? What the heck is all that about?’

‘Well, I hate to tell you this,’ Nichols grinned sheepishly, ‘but, there are sometimes issues and realities in this country that are stronger even than party bonds and party ties. In this year’s election, where questions of race and gender are factors, let alone a whole array of other factors including a stumbling US economy, voters are taking the election very seriously. Yes, there are a substantial number of Hillary Clinton voters who are likely to consider voting for John McCain. But Barack Obama can keep them if he delivers an economic message that is powerful enough.’

Just to compound the confusion, Nichols pointed out a peculiarly American political syndrome that might not have come across easily to Australians. Even though we were actually observing the Democratic Party’s National Convention, one of the country’s most prominent Republican congressmen, ostensibly an ideological opponent, had been up on the podium endorsing Obama as a presidential front-runner. ‘The fact is,’ John explained, ‘this is such a big election in America that you’re going to see fluidity in both parties — Republicans going Democrat, Democrats going Republicans, cats mating with dogs. You name it!’

Reeling a little from John’s ‘cats mating with dogs’ quip, this normally hardened Australian journalist offered that it sounded like US politics was getting ‘curiouser and curiouser’. Did that mean that ideology counts for nothing in US politics? John laughed. ‘Unfortunately, we have such personality-based politics in the US right now that party labels mean less and less. Every poll tells us that the average American thinks of himself more as an independent than a Democrat or Republican. What we know is what we don’t like.’

Americans though, he said, were pretty certain they’d had enough of George W Bush, so much so that he would probably not be mentioned a whole lot, if at all, at the imminent Republican Convention. ‘But, by the same token, they don’t know whether they particularly like John McCain or Barack Obama. So these conventions are really more like long commercials for each of the candidates. If we look at them in that way, Hillary Clinton’s public endorsement was probably the best commercial Obama will get — besides his own speech, of course.’

One final question about Hillary, the big-stakes player, before we moved on to Obama, the man of the Democrat hour. A commentator in the Denver convention hall had said that Hillary ‘was keeping the door open for a future bid for the White House’. ‘Do you think that maybe in 2016 at the latest, if not earlier, 2012, Americans — and the world if you like — could find themselves confronted by Hillary Clinton again as a potential US presidential candidate?’

That drew another laugh from John. ‘I love the politeness of you Australians inserting the word maybe like you did. The reality is that Hillary Clinton is absolutely a candidate for the Presidency in 2012 — if Obama loses — and in 2016 if Obama wins. Hillary is going to work very, very hard at suggesting that a feisty lady in her late-sixties might still be able to serve as President.’ Don’t rule Hillary out. Never rule Hillary out!

Of course, as things have turned out, Barack Obama may have short-circuited any unsated Clinton presidential aspirations by making her an offer she found absolutely impossible to refuse, the internationally prestigious post of US Secretary of State. As I write, she’s making a pretty good fist of one of the world’s trickiest jobs at one of the world’s trickiest times.

The occasionally loose-lipped Democrat veteran Senator Joe Biden, by now Barack Obama’s running mate, had declared a year earlier that Obama was not ready for the nation’s top job. The Presidency, Biden said, was ‘not something that lends itself to on-the-job training’ — not exactly a screaming endorsement of the young lawyer from Chicago. The reality, John went on to explain, was ‘that in presidential politics, the primary season is always the time in which embarrassing statements are made and have to be lived down even by Vice-Presidential candidates.’

With my Down Under wisdom of distance, I wanted to hear why Americans could be persuaded to hand over a struggling economy and a sagging international reputation, let alone ‘the war on terror’ and their national security, to an inexperienced 47-year-old African-American long on rhetoric and short on substance? Was Obama just too risky? And besides, he’s got a couple of funny names — including a real clanger, Hussein!

Nichol’s reply was characteristically whimsical. ‘Well,’ he sighed, ‘eight years ago, we gave the Presidency to a white guy who had a pretty normal name and it didn’t seem to work out so well. So, I think the theory is try the opposite. At the highest level, that may sound funny. But, when we dig down into the politics of it, there’s a lot of that going on in America. There are a great many Americans who are looking for a radical change from what George Bush and Dick Cheney gave this country.’

That may be fair enough. But wasn’t the critical question whether or not Americans believed Obama could actually deliver the change he’d been going on about from the moment he put his head up on the big stage? ‘Is it not so much whether he’s experienced or inexperienced, whether he’s black or whether he’s white, but whether he can do the job? Can he deliver the things he’s promised — whatever that is precisely?’ I asked.

Nichol’s reply was pitiless. ‘In a year when the economy is stumbling, we have several rather unpleasant wars going on around the world and eighty percent of Americans say the country is headed in the wrong direction, if Obama can’t capitalise on that, then he probably shouldn’t be President.’

‘The polling shows that Obama’s race with McCain is almost even. But at the core, beyond just slogans, Obama has to deliver an economic message to the American people. This country struggles with issues of race, class and gender. But, one of the things in our history that has always helped Democratic candidates to get beyond some of those divides is a strong populist message — à la Franklin D Roosevelt, Harry Truman-style economic message. Obama will need to deliver that message. If he fails to do so, if he just offers flowery rhetoric, then he will not be the next President of the United States.’

Obama did make it to the White House in November 2008. For a while he soared. Then for a time, he clearly struggled under the weight of the office and its issues. Now? His vision — or rather, his hope — for a New America and a New World is possibly a vain one. Both the vision and the hope.

Happy Obama Day!

Around midnight on 4 November 2008, seldom had history — not to put too fine a point on it — been made in such dramatic fashion.

Emphatically, Americans had turned their backs on eight world-worrying years of Republican rule under George W Bush. Instead, they embraced as the nation’s President — as Number One American — an inexperienced 47-year-old African-American Democrat senator from Chicago, Illinois: Barack Hussein Obama, with his political battle cry, ‘Change the country needs’. To many, his election raised doubts and fears. To just as many others, it offered hope of a positively different world.

Whatever political starting point you took — a tottering global economic system, the threat of climate change, ongoing war and conflict, dangerous race relations, religious differences, the digital divide, the world’s poverty chasm between the absurdly rich and the inexcusably poor — the political and human implications for the US, indeed for the entire world, were massive.

As auspicious events go, in recent historical terms, Obama’s unlikely and unprecedented rise to what has always been regarded as the most powerful position on the planet was up there with the release of Nelson Mandela after twenty-six years in an apartheid prison, the fall of the Berlin Wall and Soviet Communism, and September 11, 2001. And if that’s not history on the head of a pin — or at least the back of a postage stamp — what the hell is?

By dent of professional good fortune — or it may have even been half-decent judgment — we were actually there in Washington DC on the night. We’d hired a studio at a curious place called ‘The Newseum’, a flashy, super-slick building on Pennsylvania Avenue, strategically halfway between the White House and America’s national parliament on Capitol Hill. The Newseum’s inevitable detractors have written it off as the US media’s sort of memorial to itself, which would not be an entirely unfair portrayal.

But, that spot of location ‘bagging’ aside, our brand-spanking new, state of the art studio — with the Capitol building behind us as a stunning night-time backdrop — enabled us, the SBS Dateline team, to beam Obama’s victory and its euphoric reception ‘live’ back Down Under. Given the massive implications of the historic Obama win, to keep up the banter, we co-opted a bunch of acknowledged US-based ‘opinionators’.

Needless to say, veteran America-watcher and the author’s longstanding personal US political mentor, Martin Walker, was among them, plus a more recent associate, Clarence Page, a senior columnist with the Chicago Tribune in Barack Obama’s hometown, and Megan Ortagas, a Republican Party strategist.

Arne Arneson, highly regarded as a radio host and political commentator — another analyst we have turned to when US politics gets ridiculously stupid and difficult to decipher — was actually in Chicago, thronged by delirious Barack Obama fans and supporters, so much so that when we crossed to her, I wasn’t at all sure she would be able to make herself heard over the political din.

Obama Euphoria!

Super-sharp Arne — who’d been telling us for at least a year that Obama would make it to the White House — assured me that she could hear me in Washington, ‘but the competition is incredible!’

‘Arne, it’s happened — what people thought was impossible a few years ago, even probably a few weeks ago in some cases! But, is this a better result for Barack Obama than even his wildest supporters expected? In fact, the L-word is being used — landslide’. ‘It’s an incredible result, George, but what we all have to understand is that in the Democratic primaries, Barack Obama did the unthinkable. He opened a new door. What he did tonight was he allowed the American people to walk through that door. It is remarkable. His victory is palpable. When they announced here in Chicago that Obama had won, everyone flew out of the media tent. There was crying and screaming. It really is about new dreams — and an apology to the world. After eight years of mistakes, now it’s time to change.’

Other than that, Arne clearly had not been affected — at all — by Obama’s quasi-miraculous success.

In our Washington studio, I put it to my old mate, Martin Walker, that as journalists, we tend to use words like ‘historic’ too freely, but this is probably one occasion when that over-worked adjective is not out of place? ‘Historic,’ he said, ‘would be an underestimate, George. I think you could go even further. The word is epochal. This is a new epoch in America. It’s also a new epoch for the world. Let’s be frank, what we’ve really seen elected here tonight is the guy who is the nearest thing to president of the world, particularly as we’re going into this global recession. Point being, if this guy and his team can’t crack that problem, then we’re all in trouble.’

Looking on, Clarence Page, Obama’s fellow-Chicagoan, couldn’t get the biggest, silliest smile off his beaming face. I told Clarence I’d read a great quote from Anita Hill, an African-American who for years had been campaigning and working for a moment like this. She said that Barack Obama being elected President would mean that no longer will black Americans feel they can’t hold office in any job in this land — from President down. She also said it indicated just how far the US had come on the race issue in the last forty years.

Politically wily Clarence agreed profusely. ‘It certainly does,’ he said. ‘I started in this business almost forty years ago. How time flies!’ His African-American perspective on an African-American US President was captivating. Clarence was old enough, he said, to remember that when he was his son’s age, students still had to use ‘white’ and ‘colored’ water fountains in the South. He had always told his son this was his century — ‘I’m just walking around in it.’ ‘Now, he was out there knocking on doors in New Mexico for Obama.’ Clarence admitted Obama winning was ‘really hard for me to fathom, because while I’d been imagining this day, I wasn’t expecting it to come this soon. I saw Jesse Jackson crying at the celebration and I think about my 101-year-old grandmother who died last year. She didn’t quite live to see this. You think of all the people who’ve gone before us and what that means.

‘This will change the way Americans look at themselves — not just black Americans, but everybody. After eight years of a dwindling US image around the planet, now all of a sudden, the world will look at us and see once again something to look up to in America. We kind of like that …’ Why wouldn’t they?

‘Megan Ortagas, I have to say that your man, Senator John McCain, was gracious in defeat. But, I don’t think that your side of American politics expected the thumping that you got today?’ ‘Well, you know,

George, we did expect it. We all saw the polls.’ But, was there a moment when she wrote it off? When did she honestly believe there was no chance? She apparently never, never writes off elections until ‘the bitter end’. ‘I’ve been through enough — even at my young age — to see that anything can happen in American politics.

‘But, what I think was great about today — whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat — I agree with all of you that this is an historic event. Really, this is what John McCain fought for for so many years.’ This was why, McCain’s young supporter believed, he spent five and a half years as a POW in a North Vietnamese prison, ‘so that one day we can look up and see a young man like Barack Obama break every racial barrier. In what other country in the world could this happen? Even as a beaten Republican, I’m proud of my country. Barack Obama’s going to be my President over the next four years — and we’ll go at it again in 2012. Let’s see if he makes it eight!’

To an outsider, the psycho-politics were absolutely fascinating. The American Dream was alive. Even on a day like this, an event like this, an unprecedented, unlikely victory like this, my two American colleagues — one middle-aged, male and black, the other young, female and white — had different versions, different incarnations of the same Dream.

My British friend, Martin Walker, like me, an outsider, had his spin. ‘George, I’m remembering that it’s forty years ago that Martin Luther King was shot and the day before he died, he gave a speech in which he said, I’m not going to get there to the promised land with you, but you’re going to get there. This country will get there. In a way, tonight it’s got there.’

Clarence Page corrected Martin on his Martin Luther King reference. ‘One day soon we will get to the Promised Land’ — that’s what he said. ‘Barack himself preached in Alabama about the Joshua generation. It was Joshua who took the children of Israel into the Promised Land.’

Without getting totally carried away, it was impossible not to be affected. We all were — along with, I suspect, about 300 million Americans.

‘We’re getting a trifle biblically poetic here. But, are we saying, Martin, that the USA has come out of the wilderness?’ ‘It’s become the first country in the world perhaps to go into a real post-racial status. Maybe South Africa with Mandela began to point the way. But this is something extraordinarily new.’ He felt it was interesting that that was happening with Obama’s ascension right at the time when we were seeing similarly historic change in the way the global system, the global economy, works. ‘We’re seeing the rise of the new challengers, the new giants, the Chinas, the Indias. And — low and behold, here is America getting ahead of history and also signalling that this is the new world.’

I suggested to Martin, a man with his ear to the political ground, that listening to Megan Ortagas and hearing John McCain speak, were we, in fact, looking at the possibility of not just the post-racism period, but maybe even bi-partisan politics? He regarded bi-partisan appointments — Republicans in any Obama Cabinet — as at least a possibility, ‘maybe even John McCain for the Pentagon!’ ‘You’re joking?’ ‘No, I’m not,’ he said.

He was definitely going to have to explain that ostensibly outrageous suggestion to a simple working Australian journalist. ‘I find it impossible to understand how a man like McCain, who said he would chase Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell and would not leave Iraq until it was victory, could work with or for Barack Obama, whose attitude towards the situations in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Middle East is so vastly different from his?’ ‘It’s the US concept of service. I’m sure that — if called — Senator McCain would be a good soldier, as he was in Vietnam all those years ago.’

Basically what the insiders were saying was that ‘it’s a whole new ball game’, that the new politics of Obama is not just a question of the rhetoric that we’d been hearing on the stump. ‘You really believe that he’s capable of changing the way that American politics works?’ I had to ask three political hard-heads who were sounding dangerously like screaming idealists. It must have been the moment … ‘Obama always said that he was going to reach out across the aisle, and I’m sure that he will,’ Martin assured me.

Clarence Page believed both Obama and John McCain were ‘pragmatists’. ‘What happened to the old McCain we used to know? In recent months he ran as a right-winger. That’s why he brought in Sarah Palin. He had to firm up his base. Meanwhile, Barack Obama has been running as a moderate. That was all calculated on his part. Back in Illinois he was known for crossing divides of race, party, urban-suburban, to get ethics legislation through, which is not easy to do in Illinois, believe me.’

Martin Walker’s enthusiasm and positivism was almost unbridled, not the norm for an experienced analytic hard-head like Martin. ‘What we’ve seen tonight has been a boot up the bum for the old politics of America. Everything’s been changed.’ His old friend Clarence tried to rein him in: ‘I’m old enough to have seen change before, Martin, so I have a wait-and-see attitude.’

Wishful, even naive thinking or what? As things turned out, in the clearer light of a normal political day — when the refreshing mists of the 4 November idealism drifted steadily into the forgetful morass of Washington’s real politik — it didn’t happen. But, as Clarence suggested, wait and see we did. And these days, of course, to the chagrin and painful disappointment of many inside and outside the US, Obama or no Obama, American politics has regressed inexorably into horribly familiar ‘business as usual’.

Don’t Mention the War!

During the dragged-out presidential campaign that eventually saw Barack Obama packing for the White House, Barack Obama from the Left was urging an early US exit from Iraq. On the other hand, from the Right, John McCain, the legendary hero of the Vietnam War, was prepared to fight Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda ilk terrorists to the grave. But, subsequently, from both camps it was pretty much a case of ‘Don’t mention the war! It’s the economy, stupid.’

The Republican voice of Megan Ortagas reminded us of what she called ‘the dirty little secret’ of the 2008 campaign. Infamously, John McCain, the old militarist warrior, said he’d ‘rather win a war and lose an election’. As Megan put it ‘McCain went out on a limb. He was tied with Bush. He came out in favour of the surge policy which turned out to be an incredible success.’ Martin Walker had to respond. ‘Don’t get carried away, Megan,’ he said. ‘Incredible success is hardly the term for what’s happening in Iraq.’

We, at least, had mentioned the war. But, moving right along …

John McCain, I suggested, had made it ‘just a little bit easy’ for the Obama camp on the whole score of the scary possibility — to the US and the rest of us hanging off its financial coat-tails — of the entire tightly wound-up global economic ball unravelling. Breathtakingly, he had admitted that he knew ‘very little about economics’. But even more mind-blowing, then — almost at the very moment the entire monetary and banking system was beginning to crash down around our ears — he tried to tell us that the fundamentals of the American economy were ‘fine’. John! John! John!

Undaunted, Megan, the McCain acolyte, stunned us by saying that she still thought there was ‘a case to be made that the fundamentals of the American economy are strong — but I’m one of those few people who still thinks that, apparently.’ She got that bit right.

McCain, of course, desperate to distance himself from the flotsam and jetsam of the outgoing Bush Administration, repeatedly declared, ‘I am not George Bush.’ Now, that’s something else that not just Australians but, I imagine, people all over the world just don’t get — that McCain was pretty much running against George Bush as hard as the natural opponent, Barack Obama, was running against the Republican Party. What was going on? What was that all about, ideologically?

Martin Walker explained that the US, traditionally and in practice, breaks down as about forty percent conservative, forty percent moderate and twenty percent liberal. ‘McCain had to carry the party’s base.’ That’s also why he called on Sarah Palin as his Vice-Presidential running mate. ‘He had to sever himself from Bush,’ Clarence said. ‘Bush was absolutely no help to him. He was a total negative, in fact.’

‘Sarah Palin?’ I asked. ‘A plus or a minus? Are we going to see more of her down the track? I know that Martin believes we are.’ Megan Ortagas thought Palin was a ‘net-neutral’. ‘The last time we had a female who was taken seriously as Vice-President I was two years old. We all talk about this election in these grand, historic terms. For me, to see a woman as the potential Vice-President of the United States on a

Republican ticket, finally, was very moving for me and my peers.’ But surely Palin was not the best woman available, Clarence threw in. There were other Republican women out there, for instance, in the Senate. Steadfast to the GOP line, Megan remained unfazed: ‘Sarah Palin was certainly the best at this time.’ ‘Really?’ was the only response a stunned Clarence could muster.

With Palin seen as either a national joke by left-of-centre Americans or a dazzling new star on the right-wing political horizon, Martin Walker was close to adamant that she could remain a force in US politics. He certainly didn’t see her as a national joke. ‘I think she’s going to be one of the frontrunners for the Republican nomination for the presidency in 2012,’ he confidently pronounced. ‘She’ll battle against Newt Gingrich and win. If Obama turns out to be a one-term President, it could be Sarah Palin versus Hillary Clinton in 2012 for the President!’ Take that for a bold punt. You heard it here first!

An Australian Bloody Banker on Obama?!

For a different, more dispassionate, maybe even hype-free perspective on the Obama phenomenon, from down-town New York, we turned to well-known and regarded Australian, James Wolfensohn — of all things in the then turbulent economic and financial climate, a bloody banker. James had who stepped down a few years earlier after ten years as President of the World Bank. He’s now a US citizen.

‘James,’ I asked, ‘given your expertise and experience with the global economy, would you like to be Barack Obama right now, having to take over the reins of the American economy and the impact it’s had upon the world economy?’

‘Obama has the most difficult job that any American President-elect has had coming into the global scene.’

I think that’s called getting straight to the point. Is that all? Why don’t you give us the bad news, James? And he did.

‘Well, he’s got a $10,000-billion deficit in the United States. He’s got a banking situation where the world central banks have had to come in and pump nearly $9,000 billion into the banks. He has a huge overlay of bad debts around the world. And within all of that, he’s got to try and get the US economy moving again and stop a disastrous decline. So, he has a very, very, very tough job to do.’

But, from what James had seen and heard around the political and money market traps, was Barack Obama up to the enormous task and responsibility ahead of him? ‘He has around him some very good people and people he could bring in — like Bob Rubin, Larry Summers and my friend Paul Volker. There are many people around him who have the expertise to try and help. So he could bring in an excellent team. He himself has not had a lot of economic experience, but I think he’s got both the brains and the judgment to bring in the right people.’

You always feel automatically inclined to listen when Jim Wolfensohn speaks — particularly in times of global economic trauma. Arguably, he is one of Australia’s most accomplished individuals on the financial world stage. His experience of the world economy is vast — decades of it. As a dual citizen, Australian–American, what did he make of the young African-American Obama’s early impact on the rest of the world? Wolfensohn found the world’s attitude towards Obama’s meteoric rise to international prominence had been ‘intriguing’. Prior to his election, more than sixty percent of Europeans apparently were in favour of his becoming US President; the Chinese and many other nations had also expressed their approval of him as US leader. ‘Obama-mania’, I said to Wolfensohn, ‘seems to have spread throughout the globe. Is that going to make his job easier or harder, because even his Vice-President elect, Joe Biden, reckons he will be tested?’

‘Correct!’ Wolfensohn replied instantly. ‘He will indeed be very much tested. He and Joe Biden will have the most difficult challenge, as I said, that any incoming US President and Vice-President could have. There will be a welcome for him because the rest of the world felt that Bush and the Republicans have not exactly done a great job in the last eight years.’ But, the task ahead of Obama, according to our Jim, is not just to provide liquidity to the banks. Somehow, he has to work through the system all of the bad debts that are there within in it and ‘try and restore some sense of enthusiasm, so that the economies of the world don’t go into a recession’. ‘It is now almost certain that there will be a recession. When that happens, Barack Obama has to lead the world to turn that around, as the leader of the largest economy in the world.’

Did James, as a professional observer of US society, share the McCain view that Obama may not be the crypto-socialist his more politically pathological opponents would have us believe, but he is ‘a redistributionist’ — he would redistribute US wealth, as it were? ‘He is a redistributionist, that is clear,’ said Wolfensohn. ‘That’s part of the Democratic platform. But, the issue for me is not redistribution. The great focal issue at the moment is not changing tax rates. It is getting the economy moving again. We have to get the American economy moving again if they are going to get the rest of the world to have the necessary optimism and drive.’

In not so few words, according to J Wolfensohn, international banker, ‘vote local, but act global!’ Not a bad bumper sticker?

The Tests of Time

While I was busily pontificating globally from Washington DC, in Grant Park, Chicago, real Obama country, my mate, Arne Arneson, was still in the thick of raucously crazy celebrations — as she put it, ‘moving to the beat of the rock star President’. ‘This place is out of its mind, George, out of its mind. It’s so exciting.’

I hated to bring the ecstatic Arne back to Planet Earth, but felt obliged to remind her that the party had to be over at some stage. ‘The hard work is still ahead of this guy Obama. We still have no idea how good he’s actually going to be on the job.’ ‘Right! You were just talking about the economy,’ she shouted over the throng in Grant Park, ‘and what he’s going to do.’ To Arne, it was a question of two things. According to her, a devotee, Obama had already shown he has ‘remarkable judgment’. Now the question was whether he was willing to take risks. ‘Because as you and I both know, George, no-one really has a clue as to what to do about the financial crisis. So it is going to be a combination of judgment and risk and the world needs Barack Obama to exercise both.’

Still with us from New York, I asked Jim Wolfensohn what he thought. What should Obama’s first move be on the financial and economic fronts?

‘His first move is to put together an incredible team. I think he should announce very quickly who that team is. He should reach out quickly to people that are involved in the economy to bring in both industrialists and trade union leaders. Essentially, he should weld in place a meaningful financial program. Very shortly we have the G20, twenty heads of State coming here to the US. It is vital that Obama participates with them because the major issue is not political. It is financial. It is economic.’

Martin Walker raised his eyebrows at Jim’s suggestion that he should take part in that discussion. ‘Martin, you going to tell us that George W Bush wouldn’t have a bar of that?’ The international political interplay this threw up could never have been anticipated. It was a genuine dilemma for all the players.

Martin apparently had ‘inside information’ that Obama was not planning on attending the G20 summit, an event that, after all, would be hosted by George Bush, still the incumbent US President. ‘So, what on earth does Obama do in this situation?’ Martin said. ‘If he signs up to the George W Bush solution or to a Bush package that comes out of this, then he’s lost control of his own economic agenda. If he doesn’t, that’s going to be a real sense of disappointment for the global markets. We are damned if he does, we’re damned if he don’t.