(HOST) Commentator Olin Robison recently returned from Australia, and he says the 2008 American presidential election is already making headlines there.
(ROBISON) Australia is a wonderful place. It is a lot like Texas – except bigger. It is roughly the size of the continental United States but with less than one-tenth of the population.
To fly from Sydney – on the East Coast – to Perth – on the West Coast – is about the same as flying from New York to Los Angeles, except that the middle part really is empty of people ~ and, for good reason. Daytime temperatures in the middle, or “outback,” as they call it, can commonly reach one hundred forty degrees.
It is extremely rare that the Prime Minister of Australia gets into the American headlines, but John Howard, the current Australian Prime Minister, recently managed to do just that. He said quite publicly that if he were a member of al-Quaeda or some other terrorist group, he would be praying for a Democratic victory in 2008, with a special hope that Barach Obama would be elected.
Senator Obama was not much fazed by this. He said simply that if Mr. Howard was so enthusiastic about the Iraq war, perhaps he should send 20,000, or so Australians there to help fight the war. Those Americans who paid any attention at all to this seemed to share a view that they, the Americans, can say whatever they please about their candidates, but that non-Americans do not share that privilege. In other words, he had crossed an unacceptable line.
John Howard has been the Australian Prime Minister for about eleven years now and will be up for re-election sometime later this year. It’s of course too early to tell, but if the election were held today, he might very well lose.
Just to show how elastic the English language is, Howard is a Liberal. He heads up the Liberal Party in Australia. But he certainly is not a Liberal in the US sense. He has in fact cast his lot quite publicly with President Bush, over and over.
This has led no less a paper than London’s Financial Times to opine that in due course such devotion to Bush may leave Howard high and dry, as it were. The assumption of the Financial Times is that within two years US troops will either have withdrawn or will have started to do so.
That, in their published opinion, is likely to leave John Howard as the last international neo-con left standing. They further speculate that such devotion to Bush may well bring Howard’s long political career to an end.
Who knows? Maybe yes. Maybe no.
In the meantime, I was recently in the domestic airline terminal in Sydney, waiting for a flight across country to Perth. Someone turned on the lounge television, and there, I kid you not, was Dr. Phil. Really.
Olin Robison is past president of both the Salzburg Seminar and Middlebury College. He now lives in Shelburne.