NEWS AND VIEWS
Australia

Other Countries

Tuesday, 13 February 2007

A Handy Change of Subject

The first and obvious point to make about Howard’s attack on the Democratic Party presidential candidate is that it will do Howard no harm at home. The diplomatic niceties of not interfering in the politics of another country will concern very few voters here. If anything there will be merit marks for getting stuck in to an American. Puts an end to that notion that our PM is too subservient to those Yanks doesn’t it! Show our PM is a tough old blighter too when he wants to be. We admire a bit of toughness even if we are on the side that wishes it was George W. Bush, not some bloke we have never heard of, that got the tongue lashing.

As to putting the spotlight on to Iraq, I am not so sure. Australians seem to be turning against the war and are increasingly suspicious about why we got involved in the first place. But there are not yet masses of passionate opponents and there will not be while ever the Australian involvement is nothing more than token. It takes more than an accidental death or two overseas to stir up anti-war sentiment to the point where it dominates concern about living standards back home.

Perhaps the most significant political event of the week, then, is not a slanging match about Barack Obama but the report from the Reserve Bank suggesting that interest rate rises have done their anti-inflation job and the next movement will be down rather than up. As for warning clouds, John Howard should be more worried about that same Bank report’s comments about rising rents than rising temperatures.

Gerard Henderson’s Sleazy Tactic

In his Sydney Morning Herald column this morning Gerard Henderson came to John Howard’s defence for attacking the “US Democratic Party presidential aspirant Barack Hussein Obama”. Let’s not worry about the Henderson view that Howard was “essentially correct”, if “undiplomatic”, in declaring that Obama was ecouraging those who wanted to destabilise and destroy Iraq when he called for a withdrawal of American troops by March next year. The Sydney think tank man is as entitled as the next person to think what he likes. It is with that “Hussein” word that Henderson has sunk down to the sleazy depths of the very worst of the right wing apologists for the George Bush war machine.

The Washington Post put it rather nicely in its editorial of 26 January this year. “It’s become a fad among some conservatives to refer to the junior senator from Illinois by his full name: Barack Hussein Obama. This would be merely juvenile if it weren't so contemptible.”

By highlighting a second name that Barack Obama himself never uses the commentators clearly hope to leave the impression that his words can be discounted because he is a Muslim or a Muslim sympathiser and thus not a true American. To quote the Washington Post editorial again: “Those who take pains to insert it when referring to him are trying, none too subtly, to stir up scary images of menacing terrorists and evil dictators. They embarrass only themselves.”

The genesis of much of the slime being stirred up about candidate Obama was a Salon.com article “The new face of the Democratic Party -- and America” that appeared back in March 2004. In it the writer Scott Turow mentioned the Muslim heritage, which the conservatives in America, and now Henderson, seem obsessed with, along with the Christian influences, which the same conservatives ignore.

The following extract from Turow’s article gives a more accurate flavour of what was an interesting early life.

His parents met as college students in 1960. His father, also named Barack Obama, was from Kenya's Luo tribe, the first African exchange student at the University of Hawaii. His mother, Anna, had gone to Hawaii from Kansas with her parents. Even in Hawaii's polyglot culture a black and white couple remained at best an oddity in 1961, when Obama was born; at the time miscegenation was still a crime in many states. Nor was Obama Sr.'s marriage welcomed in Kenya. Under those pressures, Obama's father departed when Barack was 2 to pursue his Ph.D. at Harvard, leaving his son with mother and grandparents. When Obama was 6, Anna remarried. Her new husband was Lolo, an Indonesian oil company manager, and the new family moved to Djakarta, where Obama's sister Maya was born. (Obama describes her looks as those "of a Latin queen.")

After two years in a Muslim school, then two more in a Catholic school, Obama was sent by his mother back to her parents' home so that he could attend Hawaii's esteemed Punahou Academy. Living with two middle-aged, middle-class white people (his grandfather was a salesman, his grandmother a bank employee trapped by a glass ceiling), Obama struggled as an adolescent with the realities of being African-American, an identity that was in part imposed by others, and yet one he also embraced as the legacy of a father for whom he yearned but with whom he enjoyed only sporadic contact. He attended California's Occidental College, then Columbia. After graduation he moved to Chicago, where he worked for a number of years as a community organizer on the city's South Side, employed by a consortium of church and community groups that hoped to save manufacturing jobs.