What Europeans Need to Know about Our President-Elect Obama

BBC news makes all British think that all of America is celebrating the election of Obama. I have to remind them first of all that about the same number of Americans voted against him as the entirety of the U.K. population!

But I'm quick to say that it is good that Americans proved themselves capable of electing a black person as president--although this should come as no surprise since President Bush's highest ranking cabinet members were a black woman (Condi Rice) and a black man (Colin Powell), not to mention Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

To this note of celebration, however, I attach a caveat: "It is unfortunate that this particular black man is so inexperienced." Indeed, I've spent more time working on my PhD than President Elect Obama has spent in the Senate. Or to put things more pointedly: Sen. McCain has spent more time in solitary confinement in a North Vietnamese p.o.w. camp than Obama spent in the Senate. If Obama finishes out his four year term, it will the longest job he has ever held.

By way of comparison, I suppose that the most serious international crisis the world has seen in my lifetime was the coup d'état of M. Gorbachev and the fall of the Soviet Union; picture Gorbachev caged up like a bird, surrounded by his rebellious generals and tanks, and no one really knowing where the nuclear football was. Regardless of one's personal view of George H.W. Bush, the world had at the American helm in this extremely volatile time someone who had served eight years as Vice President, several years as the U.N. ambassador, two terms in congress, head of the C.I.A., who was the special envoy to China that prepared the momentous opening of that country for President Nixon, and...a World War II hero as well. Despite the ominous words of Obama's running mate Joe Biden, we hope that President-Elect Obama will not be tested in the same way.

The world has gotten all caught up in this racial euphoria. Obama's inexperience, however, should make the world very, very nervous.

Whenever I point this out to Europeans, their response is that they expect Obama to surround himself with good advisors. However, Obama's past alliances are not encouraging: Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Franklin Rains--a race-mongerer, an unrepentant terrorist who bombed the Pentagon and said he wish he'd done more when interviewed in the aftermath of 9/11, and the man who led Fannie Mae into desperate straights and caused the economic collapse.

Much more could be said. Suffice it to say that elections based on identity politics is a perilous endeavour.