What Hillary Should Say Now - Ronald Reagan's Daughter Speaks Out

An open letter to the almost-nominee.
Patti Davis | Sep 5, 2008

Dear Hillary,

Where are you? We haven't heard from you since your strong and eloquent speech at the Democratic National Convention. You might be taking a well-deserved vacation--certainly you must need one after all those arduous months campaigning. But we need to hear from you right now. We need your voice to speak for all the women (and there are many of us) who are angry at the assumption that, just because Sarah Palin is female, we will fall in line behind her.
We need you to make clear that women do not automatically judge someone because of gender; we are more concerned with the quality of their character and the depth and breadth of their experience.

We do not see rudeness and snarkiness and sarcasm as admirable; in fact, most women teach their children not to treat others in that manner, and they tend to steer clear of adults who never learned that lesson.

We respect the right of other women to raise and educate their children the way they see fit. We also respect their right to make their own child-bearing decisions with no interference from the rest of us. We ask for that same respect in return. We don't want the government in our homes or our wombs. It is, in the simplest sense, a respect for privacy, a word vehemently used by the Republican Party in reference to Sarah Palin's family. But it's not just families in the public eye who deserve privacy; we all do.

There are many definitions of toughness. Most women would probably define it as meeting the daily challenges of raising a family in an increasingly treacherous world. They would think about the nights with no sleep sitting up with a sick child, or a race to the emergency room with a child in pain. Most would not define toughness as the ability and willingness to shoot and kill an animal. Nor are they impressed by seeing a woman brandishing an assault weapon, or sitting on her couch with the skin and head of a dead grizzly bear behind her.

Hillary, you have a more prominent voice than the rest of us. We need to hear your voice reminding people that women are smart and perceptive, and perfectly capable of doing research on a candidate who chose to be snippy rather than informative about her political record.

Many of us are frightened about the future of this country. You once said, with tears in your eyes, that running for president was very personal to you--that where America goes from here was deeply personal. It's personal to us also. Please help us communicate that putting a woman on a presidential ticket is only a good thing if it's the right woman.

Certainly, those of us who watched the Republican convention saw a woman who knows how to throw zingers. But few of us, if any, were encouraged by that. America is in trouble. We need hope, we need solutions, we need dignified, compassionate leadership. If we want zingers we'll turn on Comedy Central.

Respectfully,
Women who are waiting to hear from you

Gender Politics

For Movie Lovers Out There

New Superhero: McCain the Reckless!

McCain's pregnant pause

By LISA VAN DUSEN | 9/4/08

The Republican Party has been busily spending its convention week trying to shrink George W. Bush, in the rear-view mirror, to half his normal size while at the same time inflating Sarah Palin to something approaching national stature.

The Alaska governor was picked as John McCain's vice-presidential nominee for her gender, her plucky frontier carny narrative (she can change a diaper, shoot a bear and skin a moose with her teeth ... all at the same time!) and her all-American, pageant-pedigree glamour.

Her story, which includes the first-ever born again, anti-abortion, pro-gun, scorched earth campaign for mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, is emerging in the leftie blogosphere as the right-wing Manchurian Candidate nightmare equivalent of the liberal Manchurian Candidate nightmare circulated by the raging right about Barack Obama early on.

If John McCain can be thankful for anything this week it's that chatter-wise, Palin has stomped all over Bush in her black go-go boots, though the upstaging comes at a price. As a word-association prompt, Sarah Palin continues to evoke a single buzzword: "Seriously?!"

McCain's short-term Palin problem is about how it's never good to have your agenda overtaken by talk of teenage pregnancies and Lucy-and-Ethel baby switching stories, shady car washes and abuse of gubernatorial power.

HIS PROBLEM

McCain's long-term Palin problem isn't about Sarah Palin, it's about John McCain.

Because this was such a -- for lack of a more subtle but equally accurate term -- crazy choice, the assumption last week was that Palin must have been vetted to within an inch of her life.

(Saying she has more experience than Barack Obama is no less crazy: University of Idaho vs. Columbia and Harvard Law Review; occasional local sportscaster in Alaska vs. community organizer on the South Side of Chicago; Mayor of Wasilla vs. four-term Illinois State Senator; thwarted burner of Wasilla library books vs. author of two bestsellers; 20 months as CEO of a state whose biggest problem is how to spend all that oil money vs. three years in the U.S. Senate and 19 months as CEO of arguably the most successful presidential campaign operation in U.S. history; staring down the junkyard dog Murkowski machine vs. staring down the Godzilla Clinton machine).

But Palin wasn't vetted until the last minute, which means, for the purposes of this job, she wasn't vetted at all. McCain made his most important pre-presidential choice on impulse and from weakness, which is precisely what it looked like: Hail Mary Barbie. That was proven by the subsequent boom-boom-boom of all those the land mines in her background that would have been tripped sooner if the media had thought she was qualified enough to even make the short list.

Meanwhile, his choice of an understudy commander in chief who has been so blankly incurious about the rest of the world as to have lived 42 years without a passport has got to be generating an epidemic of groany jokes in five languages in all the other seven G8 capitals.

McCain spent August convincing Americans of his fitness as commander in chief on foreign policy and national security issues and of his competence as a decision maker. So far, September is making him look reckless, small-time and most of all, not very serious.

Memo to Obama Supporters: Like It Or Not, The Race Is Now Between Barack Obama And Sarah Palin

They Raise Children, Pray and Support Palin

September 5, 2008 | By KIM SEVERSON

WASILLA, Alaska — People here in Sarah Palin’s hometown learned science from her father. They remember how she led the Warriors to an unexpected high school basketball championship, her success as a beauty queen and how her family grew along with the Wasilla Bible Church.

So when Ms. Palin, then a young mother, ran for the City Council in 1992, of course they voted for her. And they kept doing so, for mayor and then for governor — especially the women who, like her, had small children, hated abortion and prayed every day.

“I admire her intelligence and I admire her integrity, but first and foremost she’s a mom, and she has an understanding of what being a mom is,” said Janet Kincaid, a grandmother and Republican who last summer opened her lakeside Wasilla home for a $20,000 Palin fund-raiser.

As Ms. Palin, a first-term Republican governor, sampled the curried tuna puffs and gave her speech, Ms. Kincaid recalled, even the woman who cleans Ms. Kincaid’s house decided to give money.

Although some liberal Democrats dismiss them as “Palinbots” for their reflexive devotion, these women are as dedicated to Ms. Palin as the women Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, called her sisterhood of the traveling pantsuits were to their very different version of the modern female politician.

These are women who dip in and out of the work force, believe in prayer and spend their days trying to keep the crayon off the walls. They feel they have been looked down on by Clinton feminists and ignored by the power structure in the Republican Party. The fact that Ms. Palin has five children, including Trig, a newborn with Down syndrome, only makes her that much more part of the sisterhood.

“I’m not that into politics,” said Delores Field, an Alaska Inupiat from Eagle River, near Anchorage, who does not consider herself a Democrat or a Republican. “I’m just going to vote for Trig Van Palin’s mom.”

This segment of Ms. Palin’s supporters are not the women of Phyllis Schlafly’s deeply conservative generation of Republican women, nor are they the polished women who might have enjoyed lunch with the first lady, Laura Bush, in her Texas days.

Like many women in the valley where Ms. Palin comes from, her appeal here, and in recent days across the country, is more about who she is — that is, a devout Christian with a husband who supports her career, but a person who is not afraid to show up in public with a baby on her hip.

“She didn’t create this, but she showed up at the right time,” said Darla Shine, whose Happy Housewife Club franchise includes a talk radio show, a book and a Web site that receives millions of hits a month. “She represents a huge pocket of women who have been the ignored community for so long.”

Although strong opposition to abortion and an evangelical approach to Christianity are often shared traits among the Palin women, they do not necessarily walk lock step with Republican politics, said Serrin M. Foster, president of Feminists for Life, a lobbying group with 28,000 members, including Ms. Palin.

Some of the group’s members are vegans who might not appreciate Ms. Palin’s penchant for hunting moose. Others might consider themselves moderates who could vote for either party.

“There is a spectrum within the pro-life movement,” Ms. Foster said, “and Sarah is proof that you can be pro-life and pro-woman.”

Rick Mystrom, a Republican who was the mayor of Anchorage when Ms. Palin was Wasilla’s mayor, said other women in Alaska who are politicians, like Senator Lisa Murkowski, also a Republican, are seen differently, as part of the Alaska political machine. (Ms. Murkowski supports abortion rights.)

“Sarah’s appeal,” Mr. Mystrom said, “is that she is everywoman and she became what every woman thinks she can become.”

Ms. Palin’s evangelical Christian beliefs were an asset in this conservative state, and they also helped propel her to the Republican ticket as Senator John McCain’s running mate. She is part of a generation of Christian women who began serving on school boards and small governmental bodies in the 1990s, and often look out for one another.

When she bucked her party and then ran against the Republican governor in 2006, she did not get much support from the traditional channels. So Republican women’s clubs around the state came through by raising tens of thousands of dollars for her campaign.

Ms. Palin’s political career has grown along with her church, which began with a few families and recently moved to a new building that seats 400 and hosts three services on Sunday.

Steve Menard, a member of the church who is running for Wasilla mayor next month, said that although the church helped Ms. Palin’s rise, a political climate ready for someone like her was helping her national profile.

“You needed the right candidate at the right time,” Mr. Menard said, “to open doors for working women who share a set of values.”

Her ability to mix church, family and politics is part of the draw. Through connections with other longtime family friends, including political allies and members of her church, she was able to raise the sales tax in Wasilla as a way to help finance a $15 million sports complex that featured a new hockey rink for her son Track to play on.

This summer, several Christian groups came together for a day of prayer at the arena. Ms. Palin was there with her infant Trig in her arms and a daughter, Piper, nearby.

Some of Ms. Palin’s critics say that her popularity, to a degree, is superficial.

Mike Doogan, who for 14 years was a columnist with The Anchorage Daily News before he became a Democratic state legislator, said he understood her appeal to a certain type of female voter.

But Mr. Doogan said her image was carefully cultivated to do just that.

“There is no more unlikely hockey mom on this planet,” he said. “They are usually not this politically ambitious or cut-throat.”

Anne Kilkenny, who said she voted for Ms. Palin in city elections, said she became disillusioned with her after participating in Wasilla city government and seeing Ms. Palin up close.

“You’ve got to remember,” Ms. Kilkenny said, “we are not much bigger than a high school and she is the homecoming queen.”

None of that matters for the women who see Ms. Palin’s rise as their rise.

“Sarah Palin is a different kind of feminist,” said Joy Ng, who lives in Kodiak with her husband of 35 years. “She is a strong woman who can wear a skirt and be proud of it.”

Get a grip, America! Perspective from Joe Biden

Sarah Palin's speech to the GOP Convention last night...

...felt like a coming out party for unrepentant fascism, like the KKK convening without sheets, all ushered in by a small town debutante, their beauty queen...a devout demagogue in her own right -

zjm

GOP...Liars, Liars, Pants on Fire - Pay Attention America!

By JIM KUHNHENN, Associated Press Writer

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and her Republican supporters held back little Wednesday as they issued dismissive attacks on Barack Obama and flattering praise on her credentials to be vice president. In some cases, the reproach and the praise stretched the truth.

Some examples:

PALIN: "I have protected the taxpayers by vetoing wasteful spending ... and championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress. I told the Congress 'thanks but no thanks' for that Bridge to Nowhere."

THE FACTS: As mayor of Wasilla, Palin hired a lobbyist and traveled to Washington annually to support earmarks for the town totaling $27 million. In her two years as governor, Alaska has requested nearly $750 million in special federal spending, by far the largest per-capita request in the nation. While Palin notes she rejected plans to build a $398 million bridge from Ketchikan to an island with 50 residents and an airport, that opposition came only after the plan was ridiculed nationally as a "bridge to nowhere."

PALIN: "There is much to like and admire about our opponent. But listening to him speak, it's easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform — not even in the state senate."

THE FACTS: Compared to McCain and his two decades in the Senate, Obama does have a more meager record. But he has worked with Republicans to pass legislation that expanded efforts to intercept illegal shipments of weapons of mass destruction and to help destroy conventional weapons stockpiles. The legislation became law last year. To demean that accomplishment would be to also demean the work of Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, a respected foreign policy voice in the Senate. In Illinois, he was the leader on two big, contentious measures in Illinois: studying racial profiling by police and requiring recordings of interrogations in potential death penalty cases. He also successfully co-sponsored major ethics reform legislation.

PALIN: "The Democratic nominee for president supports plans to raise income taxes, raise payroll taxes, raise investment income taxes, raise the death tax, raise business taxes, and increase the tax burden on the American people by hundreds of billions of dollars."

THE FACTS: The Tax Policy Center, a think tank run jointly by the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, concluded that Obama's plan would increase after-tax income for middle-income taxpayers by about 5 percent by 2012, or nearly $2,200 annually. McCain's plan, which cuts taxes across all income levels, would raise after tax-income for middle-income taxpayers by 3 percent, the center concluded.

Obama would provide $80 billion in tax breaks, mainly for poor workers and the elderly, including tripling the Earned Income Tax Credit for minimum-wage workers and higher credits for larger families.

He also would raise income taxes, capital gains and dividend taxes on the wealthiest. He would raise payroll taxes on taxpayers with incomes above $250,000, and he would raise corporate taxes. Small businesses that make more than $250,000 a year would see taxes rise.

MCCAIN: "She's been governor of our largest state, in charge of 20 percent of America's energy supply ... She's responsible for 20 percent of the nation's energy supply. I'm entertained by the comparison and I hope we can keep making that comparison that running a political campaign is somehow comparable to being the executive of the largest state in America," he said in an interview with ABC News' Charles Gibson.

THE FACTS: McCain's phrasing exaggerates both claims. Palin is governor of a state that ranks second nationally in crude oil production, but she's no more "responsible" for that resource than President Bush was when he was governor of Texas, another oil-producing state. In fact, her primary power is the ability to tax oil, which she did in concert with the Alaska Legislature. And where Alaska is the largest state in America, McCain could as easily have called it the 47th largest state — by population.

MCCAIN: "She's the commander of the Alaska National Guard. ... She has been in charge, and she has had national security as one of her primary responsibilities," he said on ABC.

THE FACTS: While governors are in charge of their state guard units, that authority ends whenever those units are called to actual military service. When guard units are deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, for example, they assume those duties under "federal status," which means they report to the Defense Department, not their governors. Alaska's national guard units have a total of about 4,200 personnel, among the smallest of state guard organizations.

FORMER ARKANSAS GOV. MIKE HUCKABEE: Palin "got more votes running for mayor of Wasilla, Alaska than Joe Biden got running for president of the United States."

THE FACTS: A whopper. Palin got 616 votes in the 1996 mayor's election, and got 909 in her 1999 re-election race, for a total of 1,525. Biden dropped out of the race after the Iowa caucuses, but he still got 76,165 votes in 23 states and the District of Columbia where he was on the ballot during the 2008 presidential primaries.

FORMER MASSACHUSETTS GOV. MITT ROMNEY: "We need change, all right — change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington! We have a prescription for every American who wants change in Washington — throw out the big-government liberals, and elect John McCain and Sarah Palin."

THE FACTS: A Back-to-the-Future moment. George W. Bush, a conservative Republican, has been president for nearly eight years. And until last year, Republicans controlled Congress. Only since January 2007 have Democrats have been in charge of the House and Senate.

___

Associated Press Writer Jim Drinkard in Washington contributed to this report.

Palin: Abuse of Power?

Also check out 'George Washington's Cousin' for an excellent piece called:
Children, Politics, and "Family Values"

More Zealous Religious Fascism Is Not What The World Needs

Live from St. Paul: America is Safe!

And Now, Appearing at Your National Carnival in St. Paul!

Talk about long overdue!

The War Crimes of the victors are never punished - they simply disappear into the fanciful weave of cultural folklore.

That no serving U. S. president has ever visited Hiroshima is scandalous...that no apology has ever been extended, a mockery of international justice.

Hats off to U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who on Tuesday, became the highest-ranking serving American official to pay respects at the memorial site of the world's first atomic bomb attack.

zjm

More on the GOP VP pick...

Sarah Palin: "conduct unbecoming a human being, never mind a governor" - Vice President, or God Forbid, President? PLEASE!

Palin's responses on radio talk show very unbecoming

DAN FAGAN | COMMENT | 1/27/08

The governor's appearance on KWHL's "The Bob and Mark Show" last week is plain and simple one of the most unprofessional, childish and inexcusable performances I've ever seen from a politician.

Anchorage DJ Bob Lester unleashed a vicious, mean-spirited, poisonous attack on Senate President Lyda Green last week while our governor was live on the air with him.

When we played the tape on my show the day after it happened, we received 130 calls. Even some Palinbots were disgusted.

The Daily News posted the recording on its Web site and it fired up bloggers.

The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner editorial writers demanded the governor apologize. The Juneau and Ketchikan papers also ran the editorial.

The Daily News opinion page addressed the governor's gaffe. They wrote "She came off looking immature herself, almost high-schoolish. It was conduct unbecoming a governor."

It was conduct unbecoming a human being, never mind a governor.

The governor's office eventually tried to spin the public relations disaster, releasing a statement reading, "Governor Palin was caught off guard by Bob Lester's reference to Senate President Lyda Green."

I don't buy it. Early on in the conversation before Palin started to crack up, Lester referred to Sen. Green as a jealous woman and a cancer. Palin, who knows full well Lyda Green is a cancer survivor, didn't do what any decent person would do, say, "Bob, that's going too far."

But as the conversation moved on, Lester intensified his attack on Green.

Lester questioned Green's motherhood, asking Palin if the senator cares about her own kids. Palin laughs.

Then Lester clearly sets the stage for what he is about to say by warning his large audience and Palin. He says, "Governor you can't say this but I will, Lyda Green is a cancer and a b----." Palin laughs for the second time.

What were teenage boys thinking when they heard the governor laugh at someone being called a b----? How about the teenage girls who look up to Palin. What did they think when they heard her laugh?

But there is more. Lester then describes Green's chair as big and cushy. A clear reference to the senator's weight. Palin laughs a third time. She's just having a grand old time.

Palin was clearly enjoying every second of Lester's vicious attack on her political rival.

But it gets worse.

Lester asks Palin point blank: "Do you have any idea of what you did, to make Lyda Green dislike you, hate you?" How does Palin respond? Does she do the right thing? What you would expect from a mature leader, a governor and say, "Bob, Lyda doesn't hate me."

No, she responds like a 13-year-old and says, "Um, you know once and a while I try to figure that out but I can't figure that out."

The Palin camp says the governor did call Green and apologize. That was the right thing to do. But the governor's statement shows the apology a half-hearted one.

The statement in part reads: "The Governor called Senator Green to explain that she does not condone name-calling in any way and apologized if there was a perception that the comment was attributed to the Governor."

But there's strong evidence Palin did condone Lester's name-calling. At the end of Lester making fun of Green as a mother, calling her a cancer, twice, and saying she has to go; after calling the senator a b----, making fun of her weight, and accusing Green of being jealous and hateful; after all of that, Lester ends the conversation offering to visit Palin.

How does Palin respond? "I'd be honored to have you."

The statement released by the governor's office also called Palin's action bad judgment.

But bad judgment is when you stay up late the night before a big test, order steak at a Chinese restaurant or wear blue jeans to a black tie affair.

What the governor did was wrong.

Not only did she sit by and watch a decent public servant get thrashed in front of tens of thousands of people, she actually enjoyed it.

This is our governor, for goodness sake.

Our leader. I wonder.

Dan Fagan is a radio talk show host on KFQD 750 AM

Have a listen for yourself...

A woman - but why this woman?

Susan Reimer | 9/1/08
So. This is what being pandered to feels like.

John McCain picked Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska and mother of five, to be his running mate to woo women like me.

He seems to think that my girlfriends and I are so disappointed that an utterly qualified woman is not going to be president that we will jump at the chance to vote for an utterly unqualified woman for vice president.

You gotta love a guy who thinks things are that simple.

Women already outvote men in this country, and it isn't because we like voting for all those women on the ballot.

Does McCain think we will be so grateful for a skirt on the ticket that we won't notice that she's anti-abortion, a member of the NRA and thinks creationism should be taught alongside evolution?

His selection of Sarah Palin is insulting on so many levels that I am starting to feel like the Geico caveman.

You want to look like a maverick and like you think outside the box? Pick a woman for a running mate.

You want to look good to the evangelicals? Choose a running mate with a Down syndrome child.

(When James Dobson, the conservative Christian radio host who fancies himself a kingmaker, jumped up to say that the selection of Palin means he can now "pull the lever" for John McCain, I almost felt sick. I don't know what I'll do if she trots out the story of her 5-month-old baby to shore up the Republican base.)

Palin's personal story is very compelling, but it reads more like a movie pitch than a resume for national leadership.

Champion high school athlete, beauty queen. Married to her high school sweetheart. Car-pooling supermom who went from PTA activist to mayor of her tiny (population 9,000) Alaskan town.

Fisherman, sportswoman, hunter. Speaks truth to power in a state corrupted by oil. Has a son headed to Iraq. A woman who made the decision to carry to term a baby she knew to be developmentally disabled.

She makes John McCain, Naval Academy graduate, fighter pilot and prisoner of war, look like just another grouchy, old, rich white guy.

Oh. Right. He is.

And that's the other point here. McCain is 72. He has had at least four go-rounds with melanoma, a deadly cancer.

Under the circumstances, the decision to choose this woman over the likes of, say, Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson looks less like a stroke of genius than a stroke. It looks crazy. It looks wacky.

And that's the other part of this decision that is so infuriating.

If you are going to pick a woman for the sake of picking a woman, can you at least make it a credible choice?

Can you at least make a choice that doesn't give the gag writers for Jay Leno and Jon Stewart the month off?

(The jokes started immediately: She won't be able to hold her own against Joe Biden in a vice presidential debate. But wait until the swimsuit portion of the competition.)

Can you at least make a choice that doesn't have Rush Limbaugh panting? (He called Palin a "babe." It was another memorable moment in the ascent of women in this country.)

Barack Obama was the editor of the Harvard Law Review, for heaven's sake. And the best McCain can do is a woman who minored in poly-sci at the University of Idaho?

Palin might do just fine during the campaign. And she might do an excellent job of going to diplomatic funerals. (Which McCain once said is the only job description for the vice presidency.)

But it is more likely that she will be in over her head, and all the women McCain thinks he is courting will be cringing for our sister instead. And then we will be furious at him for setting one of us up to fail.

It isn't just that Palin might look bad campaigning against the likes of Biden or Obama.

It's that she already looks bad compared to the likes of Hillary Clinton.

Best Stay in Alaska, Governor

Bill Maher on the choice of Sarah Palin

Eyes of World on American Election

I was privileged to spend most of the first 15 years of my life growing up in the Philippines. My view of the United States was formed through a lens looking back at the white picket fences of my country, as opposed to having those white picket fences serve as blinders to keep the rest of the world at bay. I came to understand the difference between the love other peoples of the world have for Americans and the American Dream...and the disdain they hold for the often provincial and myopic political leadership that wars against that very American Dream, as well as the best interests of all nations.

Lisa Van Dusen has penned a column this morning that brings to life the importance of Barack Obama, and his campaign, to all of us who inhabit this tiny planet at this critical juncture in history. It is a column of wisdom that reflects the perspective of the world I came to know as a child looking out over the South China Sea.

zjm

Eyes of World on American Election

by Lisa Van Dusen, Sun Media

One thing about U.S. presidential campaigns that doesn't apply anywhere else on the same scale is that when America picks a president, the whole world is watching.

If there was any doubt elsewhere that progress has a life of its own in America, 45 years after Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech and 40 years after Bobby Kennedy predicted it could happen within 40 years, the first black candidate claimed the mantle of presidential nominee of a major party.

When Barack Obama accepted the Democratic Party's nomination Friday night, it meant something not just to African Americans and to all Americans, but to people watching around the world, many of whom doubted that it could actually happen.

For all the hits Obama took this summer from the Republicans for his international popularity, it was no accident that 200,000 people came out to hear him speak in Berlin in July, and it's no accident that he's equally popular elsewhere, including Canada.

It isn't, as the attack-ad mongers would have you think, because foreigners are foreign and so is he. Obama's race didn't matter to those people who stood in Berlin that day; Germans have their own historic traumas to heal. But they know his race does matter to some Americans, and that if he becomes the next president of the United States anyway it will be in part because enough of those voters overcame the very fears of change, of the unknown and of the "other" that his international popularity has been used to stoke.

It may be that Obama is popular elsewhere not just because, in Canada for instance, we tend to favour Democratic presidents but because an Obama victory would somehow represent the end of that era of post-9/11 insularity and fear that, projected as Bush foreign policy, became neurotically anti-diplomatic and objectifying to the countries in its crosshairs.

Because of the way he talks about America's role in the world and maybe because outsiders suspect that, as an African-American, he has a more nuanced relationship with power than previous presidents, foreigners see in Obama a potential dialing down of the big-stick Bush overkill of the last eight years.

As so many polls have shown in the years since the invasion of Iraq, foreigners still make the distinction between America and its leadership.

People still see and love those things about America that have lured, for more than a century, so many who know that to take your chances on an American experience you have to actually drink the water and for them, Obama represents more than the sum of his parts even as a symbol of racial reconciliation.

There may be a sense that if enough Americans can overcome that downright un-American reflex to stick with the safe and the inward, especially after the kind of shock that would understandably make you wary of the unknown, then there may be light at the end of the post-9/11 tunnel.

Even before Obama's speech Friday night, the rest of the world got hints from Denver that this election process might hold something close to the promise of a new normal.

SOMETHING LARGER

When Hillary and then Bill Clinton overcame the campaign baggage of seeing their own dream slip away to unify the party by endorsing Obama, it not only reminded Democrats that something larger is at stake, it reminded the world that there was a president before the last eight years who knew something about how to communicate in a way worthy of a great power, that there could be another one and that that unfortunate interlude was more about a man than about a country.

If Obama loses on merit; if his campaign somehow derails on the ground at this late stage or if Republican running mate Sarah Palin succeeds in rustling those die-hard Hillary voters to greener pastures on the rebound or he makes the sort of huge, unforeseeable gaffe that can't but disqualify him, then the rest of the world will turn the page.

But if he were to lose because not enough voters were ready to remember that witnessing history isn't always a bad thing, the reaction elsewhere may be regret over a reunion sadly postponed with an America that people would rather not stop waiting for.