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Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Yeah, but will they miss Cheney?
Sen. Barack Obama has barely had a chance to claim the Democratic nomination and already Europeans are salivating over the idea of a new era in American politics.
Gushing the most today is the London Times which — in its lead editorial — claimed the senator had reawakened worldwide admiration for the land of opportunity.
It recalled the days of Rodney King and the Los Angeles riots when the world saw proof that America’s social fabric was still riven along racial lines. Then, despite the years of racial harmony displayed on TV by the likes of The Cosby Show and The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, the failed presidential campaigns of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton dented any rising optimism that change had come. Indeed Americans were forced to wonder whether they could ever elect a black president and also whether a black candidate could ever move beyond racial history to offer a color-blind message.
The paper said: “Such questions have been answered by Barack Obama in a way that has already rekindled America’s faith in its prodigious powers of reinvention — and the world’s admiration for America.” He could still lose the White House “but today at least the tide of history seems to be with him. Win or lose in November, he will have gone farther than anyone in history to bury the toxic enmity that fueled America’s Civil War and has haunted it ever since.”
Obama’s Republican opponent, “too tough to die”, embodies many strengths that Obama can only applaud. “But he has his own. The epic continues. Act II starts now.”
