Radio Australia Today Editorial

Barack Obama to come to Australia

2 February 2010

One of my most embarrassing moments was on the day after Barack Obama was elected President of the U.S. I was walking in to work early in the morning, bleary eyed after watching the election coverage, and I saw a colleague.

“We’ve got a black President!” I said.

Quick as a whip, the colleague replied, “I didn’t know Australia had a president.”

I wasn’t the only one to get caught up in the story. Opinion pollsters have said that the president is popular here in Australia, more popular than he is in the United States.

This might go some way to explain why Barack Obama has chosen this time to come to Australia. He has been falling in the polls and has been the subject of a vilification campaign by the American Right. They say that he has moved too far to the left in his policies and actions.

All of which baffled one commentator we had on the program this morning. Professor Dennis Altman from La Trobe University and author of a book on Australia-US relations (The 51st State?), says that, if anything, Obama has proved himself to be much more centrist than he appeared at election time.

Professor Altman was also confused about why the president would choose to take an extended overseas trip at a critical time in his term. He has mid-term elections coming up this year, and he really needs to maintain support among Democratic voters if he is to have any kind of power in the Congress and Senate. Losing this power, he could say ta ta to his legislative agenda.

Perhaps it is that the president needs some adulation in this bleak time. He is likely to be treated like to hero when he does the public events Down Under.

Make a nice break for him, so long as Kevin Rudd doesn’t bother him too much with talk about international relations, defence, terrorism, the ecomony. And oh yeah, how to win a second term.

- Phil Kafcaloudes