Obama really defeats McCain

Obama won, and I am glad. If I had a vote in the US elections, I would have voted for him.

But... I don't know whether this is the right moment to voice my reservations or not, but I will anyway. To use an American expression, I never drank the Kool-Aid with Obama. I was for Hillary in the primaries - I thought she seemed more practical. I have hope, and I certainly want change, but I really hope that Obama stops talking about those things now, and starts coming up with real and sensible solutions to America and the world's problems.

I still don't really know who Obama is. Perhaps it's just my geographic distance. I see three Obamas - there is the intellectual, left-leaning policy wonk, and the Oprah-esque guy who talks about change and hope and his troubled upbringing a lot, and there is the Republican caricature of a tax-and-spend Socialist who pals around with Bill Ayers. I'm OK with two of those, and it's not the ones you would think. I'm OK with a tax-and-spend Socialist who hangs around with Bill Ayers! I kind of like the Weather Underground - to me, they were not terrorists but left wing revolutionaries. Given their time, given the Vietnam war and the assasinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, given a series of left-wing revolutions around the world, they formed an incorrect but to my mind reasonable opinion that revolution was the way forward, and had an admirable courage in seeking to put what they believed into action. And the only people ever killed by Weatherman were, um, Weathermen... (I'd like Bill Ayers as Secretary of Homeland Security! Hey, he's qualified in a way no other candidate is likely to be. That's a half-serious if unlikely suggestion.)

The one who bothers me is the Oprah-esque guy who sounds great but doesn't have policy solutions. What little Obama policy to have been made clear to me causes me some problems, and some questions. Specifically:

1. Is he for free trade? He's made some statements that suggest he isn't. I hope that if he does have doubts about free trade that people like Warren Buffett can talk him out of it, as the last thing the world needs now is a revival of protectionism. Dan tells me he's really from the University of Chicago school of economics, which is quite different - that's Milton Friedman economics, which is waaay different. Where does he stand on this very important question?

(As an aside, the one bum note I thought Obama made in his victory speech was when he suggested we were in the middle of the worst financial crisis in a hundred years. What happened to "since the Great Depression"? Is he just engaging in excessive rhetoric, as I suspect, or does he believe that to be literally the case?)

2. Is he an isolationist? I find his position on Iraq troubling. Specifically, the question I want answered is this - if pulling out of Iraq was likely to precipitate a major civil war with potentially hundreds of thousands of Iraqi casualites, but would save a much smaller number of American lives, where would he stand? Doesn't America, having taken the incorrect decision to invade in the first place, now have a moral obligation to the Iraqi people not to leave before the country is stable, however long that takes?

Similarly, where does he stand on using American military might to confront horrible atrocities committed in other parts of the world? As a "child of Africa", what about the Sudan, what about Somalia, where this week The Guardian reported that a 13 year old girl who had been raped was stoned to death for adultery?

3. What policy solutions does he really have on global warming? With a Democratic Congress and Senate, will he make the difficult decisions which are required, or not? During one of the debates he suggested that he was for a Manhattan Project-style government backed solution. I used to be for this, but in the book I've been reading - Thomas Friedman's Hot, Flat and Crowded - Friedman argues convincingly that this is the wrong solution, and that the Manhattan Project and Apollo missions were specific cases of massive projects with a single customer and no immediate economic opportunities. Friedman instead suggests a market-based approach, and urges among other things a massive increase in US taxes on petrol. Will Obama push that sort of an agenda? I somehow doubt it.

4. Not a policy question, but I always have reservations about politicians who seem to seriously believe in a Christian god - it suggest to me a failure of intellectual rigour. I understand that in the US, politicians have to at least nominally profess their faith, but some seem to be going through the motions, and others don't, and Obama seems to really believe it.

Enough of my doubts, it's probably a day for celebration. He can't be worse than George W.

posted by Nicholas @ 4:25 PM