The Change of Heart

The USA presidential election will be held in a year time in a million miles away but I could already feel the heat of it. Names like Mitt Romney, Tom Trancredo, John McCain, Hillary Clinton and my personal favourite item of scrutiny, Barack Obama have peppered most of my current readings and become an agenda of global interest. It is simply because unarguably, the States and its proprietors directly affect the current global political climate. When most nations' foreign policy seem to focus on "how we should all stay together" or "i don't mess with you so don't mess with me", the States has, in recent time, appeared to be more interested on "it's not our fault so how we could drag others into our problems and blame them whether they like it or not?". It has created a lot of debates and division among the USA citizens (and the rest of the world) as the impact is felt in other domains as well.

Thus it explains why every candidate is supposed to plough a foreign policy that would fundamentally reflect what their office would be and it should also be something that he/she should be able to stand by with. However, being under the watch of everyone, it becomes incredibly easy to see how people crack down under the eminent pressure. For example, Obama has since changed his future foreign policy and despite having been a strong opponent of the Iraq war even before he was appointed as a Senator, he just recently promised that he would send more troops to Pakistan to curb and prevent terrorism because he believes this is where the terrosrism should be fought. Not coincidentally, that was approximately a week after Clinton called his previous foreign policy which focused on bringing back troops from the Gulf as "a naive attempt". Although McCain and Giulani from the Republican side both had policies that were more worrying as they were still planning on continuing what Bush has started, by any respect, the direction that Obama took appears rather fishy and I cannot help but to feel that it was somehow just a scapegoat.

It is obvious that he cannot take back his views and retract his stand on Iraq but what he can do is to find someone else to take the blame now. Judging from his current move, if by any chance he managed to achieve the slightest victory in his foreign policy, he would then become the one to prove that the Bush administration was indeed miscalculated and failed. But by then, damages would have already been done and two nations would have been rampaged on directly regardless of the degree of their participation in what appears to be a self-obssessed fight against terrorism. Yet, Obama seemed to please the majority of voters with this current policy. Politically speaking, to have a democrat subtly agreeing to what a republican has been doing for the past ten years is probably benefiting Obama in ways some other candidates couldn't possibly achieve. Some liberatians and republicans have come up saying that if they were to vote Obama, it would not be because he agrees with them or because he doesn't, but instead because he looks like he would at least take their opinion into consideration. Okay, fine.. he is trying to become someone who wants to satisfy everybody's need yet is that necessarily good?

It is certainly alarming to discover this new revelation considering that Obama has been my favourite candidate for the election. I remembered when he cleverly called the urgent need for the States to become the patron of everything good and rectify every bad as an "innocence", which is actually what Bush relates to as being "the police of the world" (amazing how just choice of words can change the whole concept)... He believes in cultural relativism but also transpires the fact that the American moral is indeed a bit superior, if I may say. He doesn't believe in change just for the sake of it and often insists on not accusing anyone over anything at all. Although he plausibly tells the inconvenient truth, Obama still doesn't quite appear to be in the category of aggressive orators as what half of the presidential candidates just essentially are. All of his other policies, including the applaudable health policy that will cause the Roger Moore's Sicko to be a flop had it already been imposed, seem to have claimed a place in my head as a sure winner.

He looked like something that the States could really use, something that could retain their dignity but still make them appear humble. Someone even other people might like. Yet his current shift has stirred a certain kind of anguish in me. It made me realise that Obama too probably just wants to win the election. Even if it means that he has to become something he has preached not to be.