Just kidding. Really, I know how much you're hurting. So, let's get to it!
Barack Obama is in Jerusalem this morning where the Guardian reports he has promised to restart the Mideast peace process if elected U.S. president. But his day started with meeting his Bizarro World namesake:
Obama was speaking today as he began a series of meetings during his visit to Israel and the West Bank. His hectic schedule started this morning with breakfast shared with the Israeli defence minister, Ehud Barak. Barack meeting Barak. Okay, moving on...
He also met the opposition leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, and visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, before seeing President Shimon Peres. "I will share some of my ideas. The most important idea for me to reaffirm is the historic and special relationship between the United States and Israel - one that cannot be broken," Obama said after landing at Ben Gurion airport last night. If elected, he said, he would continue to regard Israel as a valued ally. "That policy is not going to change," he said. "What I think can change is the ability of the United States government and a United States president to be actively engaged with the peace process, and to be concerned with and to recognise the legitimate difficulties that the Palestinian people are experiencing." Obama said he would work to bring the two sides together "starting from the minute I am sworn into office". But he cautioned that it was "unrealistic to expect that a US president alone can suddenly snap his fingers and bring about peace". In the afternoon he is expected to make the short drive from Jerusalem to the West Bank area of Ramallah for talks with Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad – the Palestinian president and prime minister - before returning to Jerusalem to meet Tzipi Livni, the Israeli foreign minister. He is then scheduled to fly by helicopter to the southern Israeli town of Sderot — the target of many Palestinian rocket attacks from Gaza — before returning to Jerusalem to meet Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister.
Meanwhile over in London, the Labour Party is nattering its blah prime minister, Gordon Brown, with the message, "why can't you be more like Obama?" Seriously. Both men were in Jerusalem this week and will discuss the degree to which Obama can keep the Middle East peace process at the top of his in-tray if he becomes president, a concern that preoccupies Blair in his role as envoy for the region. Brown's reluctance to make political capital out of the Obama visit has frustrated some Labour activists who hoped the visit would prompt a debate inside the party about lessons to be learned from Obama's success in creating a mass movement of activists. As one cabinet member admitted: "It is telling that whilst Obama is trying to tear down the traditional walls of the Democratic convention, and open it up to ordinary Americans, Labour's 200 most senior activists will be meeting in private this weekend to decide Labour's policy platform." The issue has been taken up most strongly by David Lammy, the young black MP for Tottenham and a friend of Obama from black alumni dinners at Harvard University. Lammy has been increasingly blunt about the inability of the British political class to draw in new faces or use new methods such as open primaries. In a recent Fabian lecture, he said: "I think it's wrong to describe New Labour as a movement. I don't think that it could be described as a movement that filtered down to ordinary people on the ground." Lammy, and other party thinkers such as Sunder Katwala, the Fabian general secretary, argue: "Obama is showing the political messages and methods of the 1990s now look very tired and out of date." Lammy warns that managerial language has alienated people and left the public disorientated. "For many people, the good things that we are doing sound more like a list of bullet points, rather than a mission to change society. So they switch off, or worse, become alienated from a party that looks like it has become part of the establishment." Katwala claims Obama, by contrast, has led a revolution in political mobilisation. Above all, he claims Obama has set out an inspirational vision of a good, and equal society, using a language of hope Labour seems to have forgotten in the daily blizzard of micro-initiatives.
Ugh. I can just see poor Gordon in front of thousands of Brits in his prim, brown suit, sounding dribbly... don't do it, brother! Last but not least, the Guardian's Jonathan Freedland offers some helpful commentary about Obama, Israel and the Palestinians:
The less lurid reality is that Obama is a down-the-line US Democrat - and firm support for Israel comes with that territory. On that simple metric, there will be no change. But that does not leave him indistinguishable from McCain. On the contrary, clear differences are there (chiefly on talking to Iran) - and most point in a direction that should be welcomed by those who yearn for Middle East peace. First, Obama will today show a basic respect for the Palestinians that somehow eluded his Republican opponent: the Democrat will visit Ramallah, which McCain skipped when he came to the region in March. Second, Obama is honest enough to admit that the Israel-Palestine conflict does at least contribute to instability in the region, while McCain sees no source of trouble except "radical Islamic terrorism". Above all, Obama promises to do, once more, the work that a US administration alone can do - engaging hands-on, directly and every day, in shepherding the two sides through negotiations and towards peace. Bill Clinton toiled in this way until his last hours in office; Bush, by contrast, steered well clear of the whole messy business until last autumn, when he panicked that he might have no other legacy to point to. Obama has faulted both Clinton and Bush for getting stuck in too late. Yesterday, in Amman, he vowed to roll up his sleeves, "from the minute I'm sworn into office". But Obama is sending a signal more powerful than mere words. Accompanying him on this trip is Dennis Ross, the veteran mediator who served both Clinton and Bush's father. Ross has his critics, but no one doubts his knowledge or experience. "I see him as the diplomatic equivalent of Michael Jordan working the Middle East," says David Makovsky, a colleague of Ross's at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which is neutral in all elections. "He has the skill and the finesse." With Ross at his side, Obama is signalling that we should forget the myth-making: an Obama presidency will be about active, engaged diplomacy, between Israelis and Palestinians, between Israel and Syria, and beyond. And if anyone doubts that this is what the world desperately needs after the past seven and a half years, then they haven't been paying attention.
| Labels: 2008 election, Barack Obama, Israel, presidential candidates |
