Saturday 1 November 2008

Barracking for Mccain

bar·rack Australian To shout support for a player or team.

A few days out from the US presidential elections and thoughts are swirling around my head.
12 months ago during the nominations I felt that Americans were not quite ready for an African-American to be their president. That’s why I thought that the Democrats would be better off with Hillary Clinton as their candidate. I was in favor of Obama over Clinton because I believed that Clinton was too far right. Even if Obama was an unknown at the time, he showed a lot of promise, a fresh face and a fresh voice and a fresh message. Nearly a year on and obviously Obama was chosen as the Democratic party‘s standard bearer. Now if Obama was white he would win hands down over McCain. And to me that’s the unknown factor – the race card. The Bradley effect. Should Obama emerge as winner come 4th November, I will applaud America for it will have achieved great strides in its race relations sooner than I expected. If however by some dark twist of fate McCain is elected then that would be a sad day indeed. Sad because by now, in this day and age, I feel humans should be above racial prejudice.
So I urge America on. Go enfranchise yourselves. Go exercise your right to vote and exorcise the worst administration from the white house. America and the world will be so much better off. The worst that could happen is that Obama will turn out like Carter – a lot of promise but not much to show for it. Or he could turn out to match his rhetoric with great achievements as a pragmatic president. And we will be celebrating this point in time as a milestone in history.
Whatever the outcome, ultimately it is your collective prerogative America - down the road towards change or more of the same old same old. I will respect your choice of course whichever way. I will just be either enraptured or sad.

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