¿Si se puede?

As John McCain and Barack Obama prepare to wage their foreign policy battles over the middle east, another much closer region remains a lacuna in the ongoing contest. Latin America has barely featured in the race, despite its historical and persisting centrality in US strategic thinking and despite the growing population of Latinos in the country. Obama will have to hope that his Latin American silence proves golden.

Latin America came up briefly during the primary season. In the November/December 2007 issue of Foreign Affairs, Hillary Clinton laid out her foreign policy blueprint for a Clinton presidency, declaring rather blandly that her stance was one of "vigorous engagement" with Latin America. The strategy behind this statement was twofold: first, to call attention to Bush's failed promise to build stronger relations throughout the continent (and perhaps to critique the administration's Cold War approach to the so-called "rogue" Latin American socialist states) and also to cater to her active and substantial Hispanic voter base.

Not to be outdone, Obama, the soon-to-be Democratic nominee, followed suit, also calling for more "vigorous engagement" with the continent, distinguishing himself from Clinton only in terms of his views on Cuba. Clinton's Foreign Affairs article was published several months after she promised to uphold the administration's draconian approach towards travel restrictions to Cuba, which Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation aptly described as "a policy in which people have to choose between attending their mother's funeral, or their father's." (The current policy allows Cuban-Americans to return to the island once every three years, and only after clearing a veritable Olympic course of bureaucratic hurdles). Smelling blood, at a Cuban Independence Day celebration in Miami in late May, Obama unveiled his own approach towards Cuba, emphasizing a greater leniency towards travel and a willingness to relax the 46-year trade embargo (a policy only a year younger than Obama himself).

Does the Caribbean exist?

As Jim Gabour seemed certain of all along, Hurricane Gustav spared New Orleans a return to the horrors and devastation of Katrina three years ago. Though eight people across the south of the United States died as a result of the storm's arrival, its impact has not been nearly as deadly as feared. The GOP now returns to the misfortune of staging a full convention that will pale in comparison to its Democratic counterpart. And national and international (particularly British) media will once again train their lenses on American political pageantry.

I'm unsettled by the media's total lack of interest in the reality of the storm. The story of Gustav was simply New Orleans. Of course, the city suffered dearly during Katrina. Journalists should investigate how well its refurbished defenses coped. But major media outlets paid disproportionate attention to New Orleans while ignoring the storm's real toll. The deaths of nearly one hundred people throughout the Caribbean passed without mention, or at best as a footnote. See, for instance, this distasteful article in The Telegraph which notes right at the end, as a one-line after-thought not worth dwelling upon, that "Gustav has already killed at least 94 people in the Caribbean".

Some reports claim that the death toll in the Caribbean has exceeded one hundred. Gustav killed at least 77 people in Haiti, while battering Jamaica, parts of Cuba, the Caymans and other islands. For more on the devastation of the storm read Global Voices Online's round-up of the Caribbean blogosphere.

The numbers are not that important; Gustav, after all, is certainly not the deadliest hurricane to sweep through the region. Rather, what is troubling is the absence of the Caribbean in the broadcasts and reports that build international consciousness. Over the weekend in the UK, Sky News transmitted live Mayor Ray Nagin's press conference from New Orleans. I wonder if the mayor knew that a British audience absorbed his dry traffic updates and announcements of road closures to Mississippi. We should never reject this immersion in a distant local experience - particularly one as brimming with human loss and endurance as New Orleans - but it is difficult to accept when its price is the elision of others. From the perspective of western TV, print and internet coverage, all roads lead to New Orleans; the Caribbean was but a path for the storm before it made its real landfall on our sense of what matters.

Palin's challenge to Obama

John McCain had a hard act to follow after the thunder of the Democratic National Convention. In the Rockies, Obama scaled the heights of political spectacle, delivering one of the surest and strongest speeches of the campaign year. What could the much more restricted McCain possibly muster in response?

We've now had a few days to dwell on the answer. The choice of Sarah Palin as the presumptive Republican vice presidential candidate breathes new life into a contest that was flagging in the late months of the summer. In selecting Palin as his running mate, McCain anointed a woman he has met only once before; a woman whose anti-choice views are unlikely to win over disgruntled Hillaryites; a woman whose short tenure as the governor of remote Alaska may undermine the edifice of "experience" that surrounds his presidential bid. Yet Palin also adds that element of surprise and adventure altogether absent from the McCain campaign.

As others see us: Godfrey Hodgson on the Democrats

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with openDemocracy author Godfrey Hodgson (39 minutes, 18 mb mp3)

When you’ve had enough of the dugout convention chatter on the US cable networks, try Godfrey Hodgson from Oxford, 5000 miles from the convention scene. I wonder if anybody sees American politics more essentially than the co-author of a reporters’ masterpiece (up there with Norman Mailer’s) on the 1968 campaign, An American Melodrama, and many other rapt studies of us. (Forthcoming: The Myth of American Exceptionalism.) Hodgson volunteers in conversation that what he missed forty years ago was the length and depth of the conservative cycle the US was entering with Richard Nixon’s election. Today, forty years later, Hodgson’s keynote is that the conservative ascendancy, having fomented the Iraq War and a Gilded Age of inequality, sounds far from broken. The “change” chord rings to Hodgson more of therapy than political reconstruction. The tune from America these days, he says, still sounds something like the Russophobic ditty sung in England in the 1870s — the song that gave “Jingo” to the lexicon of chip-on-the-shoulder patriotism.

We don’t want to fight,

But by Jingo if we do,

We’ve got the ships,

We’ve got the men,

And we’ve got the money, too.

From a popular music-hall song by G. W. Hunt, around 1877.

President "Ishmael"

Barack Obama's nomination as the official candidate of the Democratic Party offers many firsts, not least that he is the first African American to come so close to the Oval Office. Yet more importantly perhaps, Obama is the first presidential candidate to so baldly represent the histories of migration and movement that have made America. With immediate connections to Kenya, Malaysia, Hawaii and the rural midwest, Obama embodies the global narratives that course through American identity.

Such a multitude of connections may be to Obama's detriment. As Michael Powell observes in this excellent, sweeping piece in the NY Times "newcomers always rubbed up against the settled." Just as "primal rootlessness" and "wanderlust" are encoded in American DNA, so too are the myths of the small town, of Main Street and safe white fences staples of American political parlance. Thanks to his roaming upbringing, Obama remains susceptible to right-wing attacks aimed at his supposed "Americanness". But McCain - and a slew of past presidents - has no less "rooted" a past as the scion of a military family. As one scholar tells Powell, "The next US president is going to be Ishmael [the Biblical wanderer], whether we like it or not, and whether he knows it or not."

Proud to be a New Yorker

The Obama campaign is trying to reinforce its unconventional candidacy by staging an unconventional convention. Yesterday, Obama received a massive boost from Hillary Clinton. The ritual centre-piece of all party conventions is the roll call, when all the states and far-flung territories of this supra-continental country are paraded one-by-one before the TV cameras. The delegates add up, and slowly and methodically, the candidate becomes the official party nominee.

Not this time. When the roll call reached New York, Hillary Clinton appeared amidst the swarm on the convention floor. The locus of divisiveness within the party, Clinton made a powerful statement of support for Obama by asking for the suspension of the roll call and his nomination by acclamation. Instead of systematically anouncing its delegate votes, the Empire State instead provoked an astonishing moment of US Convention history. I know it was all carefully stage-managed. But as a New Yorker, I can't help but feel a bit of spine-tingling pride that the raucous and potentially historic clamour was initiated by my state.

Video below:

Bill begins to redeem himself

Bill Clinton's much anticipated speech yesterday at the Democratic National Convention went far in banishing the memory of his dismal behaviour during the primary contest. For all his growing faults, the former president remains a superb speaker. Clinton found the right balance of hard and soft, comfortably quoting the statistical evidence of the damage wrought by the Bush administration while lifting the crowd with brighter sentiment and memorable lines. Most soundbyte-able was this turn of phrase: "People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example, than by the example of our power." Clinton insisted that Obama was the right kind of leader to set a proper example in an increasingly multicultural, globalised world, and that he was "ready" to be president. Perhaps Clinton spoke through gritted teeth, but whatever; this is politics, and words matter.

Full speech in video below.

Voices without Votes on the Convention

Getting anywhere near The Big Tent is a hectic experience. There are several degrees of credentials, bracelets for backstage, dozens of smiling volunteers, free massages by Google, and free burritos and beer. This isn't where the politicians are speaking (although many visit). This is where the bloggers are convened with their power plugs, wifi, and laptops galore, writing I'm-not-sure-what yet, because I haven't had a chance to read it.

The Big Tent is ordinarily a parking lot, but now has an enormous two-story tent erected on it. The panel I spoke on was upstairs from the bloggers. The panels are back to back. Mine was organized by the Better World Campaign of the UN Foundation, and was primarily about a new poll they have published that says Americans care about foreign policy. The fact that this would be news, is sort of astonishing to me. But there is some scientific method to help establish the fact that this has changed in the past year. I always wonder whether people just respond according to what they happened to see on the news the night before.

I spoke about the work my colleagues Amira, John, Jillian and many others from Global Voices are doing on Voices without Votes, a website sponsored by Reuters where we are tracking non-American responses to the US presidential election and foreign policy. I personally, think Americans tend to focus too much on what foreign policy means for themselves (and how people perceive them), and not enough on what it means for citizens in other countries. The questions I got during the panel reinforced my sense of this.

Let me paraphrase: Do non-American bloggers say that America doesn't accomplish it's foreign policy goals? What do bloggers in the Middle East say about American women?

In other words, what does the rest of the world think about America. Well, I don't know. I think most of the time they too, are thinking more about themselves, and interpreting world events according to what makes sense in their own hemispheres and blogospheres. Please visit Voices without Votes to see the many, many different things bloggers around the world are saying. Unlike pollsters, we don't pretend to speak on behalf of entire populations or the world - but we do hope to give a taste of what foreign opinion and reasoning looks like.

Pandering to the middle?

The Nation's Victor Navasky pens an excellent piece on the missteps of Obama's campaign since his defeating Hillary Clinton. Obama risks aping the failures of John Kerry if he frets too much about the "illusory middle".

His mistake is the same one that the last two Democratic candidates for President--Gore and Kerry--made. The assumption (shared by too many campaign consultants) that the way to woo those in the center is to move towards the center. Arianna Huffington, I believe, has a point when she advises, "Instead of targeting the swing voters he should target the unlikely voters." But I would argue there's nothing wrong with targeting the swing voters. What's wrong is to pander to them on the assumption that the way to win them over is to move towards the center.

The reason they are undecided is precisely because they are not Democrats or Republicans, and they don't care about left vs. right. They care about finding someone they can connect with, a candidate they can trust. And as soon as they see a candidate who appears to be listening to his consultants and pollsters rather than being true to himself, they see a candidate who has betrayed what they care about most: authenticity.

During the pageantry of the Convention, will Obama continue to make that pitch to the "centre"? Or from the bosom of the Democratic Party, will Obama speak from a position of strength and on his own terms?

"Anything that doesn't say Biden costs $10"

I spent most of the afternoon wandering around looking at people who came here for different reasons. There are a lot of strange people here, including a whole delegation of people carrying "9/11 was an inside job" banners demanding "the truth". There are merchandise dealers everywhere, including some who managed to quickly print enough Obama/Biden shirts ($15) to put the plain Obama ones on sale ($10). The anti-abortion activists are probably the most vocal, drawing slogans with chalk on sidewalks, holding banners on sidewalks, and driving around town in a van with a blown up image of a mutilated dead baby on it.

Denver: speaking tomorrow in "The Big Tent"

I've arrived in Denver and slowly finding my way around the city. Tomorrow, I am speaking at a UN Foundation event in "The Big Tent" about Americans, foreign policy and international perceptions. Come say hello!

“New American Consensus on International Cooperation”
Location: Big Tent:DIGG Stage
Time: 3:00 PM - 3:50 PM (MST)
Scheduled to Appear:

- Geoff Garin, President, Peter D. Hart Research Associates
- Steve Clemons, Senior Fellow and Director, American Strategy Program, New America Foundation
- Rep. Bill Delahunt (invited)
- Solana Larsen, Global Voices Online

Geoff Garin will present findings from the Better World Campaign’s 2008 polling and Steve Clemons will lead the panel in a discussion of the findings and the role of foreign policy in the campaign. The UN Foundation's blog, UN Dispatch is also featuring daily posts and tweets from the convention.

Party animals in Denver

The Nation magazine is doing excellent "unconventional" coverage of the Convention on their website including blog posts, videos, and articles. On this video, festivitas-expert and Nation writer, Ari Berman, explains that lots of the action outside the convention happens outside the main events, and that lobbyists and big companies abound. In this regard, a political Convention in the United States is not dissimilar to the Olympics, as somthing with a higher purpose that is irrisistably good for business.

In the clip, Ari introduces The Most Powerful Man in Denver (You've Never Heard Of), a man named Steve Farber who is a lobbyist and chief fundraiser for the Democratic Convention. Obama says he is opposed to special interest funding, but he obviously hasn't been able to change how the entire political machine works overnight. The total budget of the Convention must be astronomical.

The Convention itself is totally scripted, and the predictability is partly what makes it more of a ceremony than a real political conversation. I met one of the speech writers, who says they have a team of writers who will be sitting behind the stage in "the pit" editing and writing politicians' submitted speeches before they go on stage. There are strict time limits they must adhere to, and they must submit their speeches in writing for editing first. I imagine it will be somewhat like the Oscar's except the people coming up to give the speeches won't be as drunk.

However, the Convention is making strong 'gestures' towards democracy and inclusion of the American people, which is nice. Unfortunately it seems less a matter of principal, than something that seems good for publicity, given how Obama is currently on the up and up. House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, says in one of the introductory webcasts, that this year's convention is "almost without walls" given how much they will be interacting with the public in Denver and on the internet.

I hope once I'm there, my faith in the US political process may be restored, but national politics here generally seem to be more about saying the right thing than doing it. With 5000 delegates and 15,000 members of the press, clearly this whole show is about publicity more than anything. There are so many gross imperfections in the political system that voters simply seem to have come to terms with and lost hope of changing. It's doesn't make it easier that those who could change it, stand to gain by allowing the status quo to persist.

But I suppose that is the case mostly everywhere, in all countries.

Would you vote Pepsi or Coca-Cola?

At times it feels the Democratic Convention operates a little bit like a big events company. Witness for instance, the press release they sent out on August 14, announcing the fact that Coca-Cola has been "Named Official Recycling Provider of the 2008 Convention" and will even be donating some recycling bins, energy-efficient coolers, and hybrid electric trucks to the city of Denver.

Cynics will wonder whether Coca-Cola's eagerness to be involved in the greening of the Convention has anything to do with the fact that Obama will be accepting the official nomination at the Pepsi Center.

From the release:

"As Official Recycling Provider, Coca-Cola Recycling, a wholly owned subsidiary of Coca-Cola Enterprises, will help develop, support and manage a system to support recycling efforts at all official Convention venues, including the Pepsi Center, INVESCO Field at Mile High and the Colorado Convention Center."

The release goes on to describe what a wonderful product Coca-Cola is and how much in love the company is with the environment. It is then signed and endorsed by the Democratic National Convention Committee. A platform for change for some, a money-making opportunity for others. American democracy seems boastful of the fact that it does both simultaenously.

The Obama and Biden Show

Democratic inboxes have been bombarded for days with emails from the Obama campaign and the Democratic Convention. Today, came the latest installment of the elegant communications operation - a video of Obama and Biden making a joint appeal for funding on the first day of the Democratic Convention. Aren't they cute together?

I'm headed to Denver for the convention tomorrow, and am looking forward to experiencing what promises to be a pretty massive and exciting event. I did apply for press/blogging credentials, but only 120 bloggers were selected to join. So I don't know how much of the official show I'll be able to catch (FYI - there's going to be a live webcast). The real reason I am going, is for the activities surrounding the Convention. Activists from across the country (and around the world) are making their way to Denver, to host and participate in dozens of events, parties, dinners, fundraisers, and at least two film festivals.

Personally, I'm also interested in studying how the use of internet and email for this Convention, which they themselves are calling "the most technologically savvy of its kind". For instance, they've set up a website called America's Town Hall where anyone can submit text or video questions for the Convention. They have apparently also scattered YouTube video recording kiosks around the Denver venue so people can record comments on the spot. Is it democracy in action, or just clever marketing? I think it depends how they use it.

The mood promises to be quite different from the Democratic Convention in 2004 where Boston police struggled to get anti-war protestors to remain inside a fenced area during daily protests. I still remember meeting 4 College Republicans who took turns wearing a giant foam flip flop (remember Kerry the "flip-flopper") who couldn't understand why people were being so mean to them. Of course, the left is still mad about the war and Bush, but Obama's dreamy message of hope and change and Bush's guaranteed exit, has got people thinking more positively.

Bad news from Iraq for McCain

Ahead of the Democratic convention, the Obama camp has plenty of material with which to strengthen its own position on Iraq and with which to set about attacking McCain. First, the Bush administration is close to agreeing a deal with the al-Maliki government that will set in place a phased withdrawal of most US troops from Iraq by 2011. The Republican candidate will not be able to lampoon the Democrat on Iraq when Obama's plan for the country more closely resembles that of the White House. Furthermore, McCain's vociferous support for the "surge" - about which he has routinely bludgeoned Obama - may be tempered by a dark turn of events in Iraq. Al-Maliki has launched a campaign against the leaders of the Sunni "Awakening Councils" - the militant groups co-opted by the US last year to fight against fundamentalist radicals - threatening to broaden internecine rifts in Iraq. As some analysts warned in 2007, the empowering of Sunni tribal factions would invariably threaten the central government. Obama's advisers will be parsing the Iraq news ticker and finding ample cause to whittle away at the robust facade of McCain's foreign policy.

Obama and Latin America's left

If Obama wins, the outreach of this peacable figure could send confusing tremors southwards

Schröder slams McCain on Georgia

The conventional wisdom has it that this month's eruption of violence between Russia and Georgia played squarely into the hands of John McCain. With pundits and hacks fulminating about a return to the Cold War, McCain has ratcheted up the rhetoric, supposedly sending a muscular to the Kremlin. He demanded that "Russia should immediately and unconditionally cease its military operations and withdraw all forces from sovereign Georgian territory." McCain, who has in the past called Vladimir Putin a "totalitarian dictator", went on to belittle the more cautious tone struck by the Obama campaign as "bizarrely in sync with Moscow." Such claims amount to preposterous misrepresentations of Obama's position and are calculated to appeal to the cruder, blustering passions of the American people. It's not just the benighted of the developing world, after all, that seek solace in their strongmen.