American election - Now the real race can begin in earnest
Hillary Clinton has had to finally accept that her eight-year campaign to win the Democratic party’s nomination to contest the American presidency has ended in failure.
She has had to acknowledge that Barack Obama will be chosen by her party to contest the election and oppose Republican nominee John McCain.
For someone as ambitious and single-minded as Mrs Clinton this must have been a bitter pill to swallow. It will have been disappointing too for her husband President Clinton who must acknowledge that he played a part in her defeat.
Whichever candidate wins, their victory will mark the beginning of the interregnum before a new name moves into the White House. It will also call time on the Bush dynasty’s reign at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Already there have been suggestions that Mrs Clinton might join Barack Obama as his running mate for the November 4 poll but at this stage it is very difficult to imagine that someone as certain as Mrs Clinton, someone with such a powerful individual character and singular voice, would be suited to a subsidiary role.
Whether Mr Obama would be prepared to embrace someone who has bitterly opposed him over the past year — despite the positive response the partnership might provoke among Hispanic voters — is moot.
It was also moot, no matter how you feel about the individuals, that the most appropriate American to be president in 2009 was married to a man who, coincidentally, had already been president for eight years.
The emotional symmetry might bear some scrutiny but the ideals of a true meritocracy would suggest that, in a population of a little more than 300 million it is highly unlikely that two people with the potential to be president just happened to be married to each other.
Mrs Clinton’s defeat will have a considerable impact on the Irish American wing of the Democratic party as some of that party’s most prominent activists had supported — vocally and financially — her campaign.
It will resonate in Ireland too. Inasmuch as we have any contribution to make to the American political process we have long been considered a branch office of the US Democratic party. This is a legacy of the golden days in 1963 — can it really be 45 years? — when President John F Kennedy came and took tea with his cousins, months before his assassination.
Barack Obama, 46, and veteran John McCain are expected to clash on virtually every issue.
One has articulated possibility and change; the other is the voice of experience formed over a long and varied career in politics and the military.
Obama’s message excites Americans disappointed with the Bush years; the Americans who would like thesuperpower to reposition itself on so many international issues, most especially the Middle East.
McCain’s experience, practical and brutal, will inspire confidence in many Americans too.
Whichever candidate succeeds we should all be grateful that the leader of the world’s only superpower is elected by proclamation rather than imposed as a figurehead in a single party state, where political difference, let alone dissent, is not even tolerated.ONCE again the gap between the rhetoric and the actuality is spectacular.In an effort to cut road deaths the Road Safety Authority planned to introduce private speed cameras around this time. Yesterday three government departments could not say when negotiations might conclude and allow the cameras be put in place.
Earlier this year, Road Safety Authority chairman Gay Byrne threatened to resign over the delay. Maybe the time has come for him to act.
Each week the Monday morning news programmes report on the weekend’s death toll on the roads. You would have to have a heart of stone not to be affected by the relentless figures.
Yet, our benchmarked public service cannot deliver a relatively simple safety measure on schedule.
This delay is unconscionable and is costing lives. Maybe yours or your loved ones.
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