POLITICS: The Audacity Continues

’ve seen this angry, loose cannon on a few talk shows and I predict she’ll be the next, at some point, to be thrown under the campaign gaffe bus. It’s just a matter of time….

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph on the eve of Mr Obama’s week-long trip to Afghanistan, the Middle East and Europe, Susan Rice emphasised that the election of Mr Obama would mark a decision by Americans to “turn the page” on President George W Bush.

Barack Obama has yet to receive his party’s nomination.

But the former Rhodes Scholar, who took her Master’s degree and doctorate in international relations at New College, Oxford, made clear that an Obama administration would also challenge Europe to do more after a Democratic victory in November’s election.

Barack Obama has yet to win the presidency.

“It would signal a return to the more pragmatic and bi-partisan traditions of American foreign policy, which have been lost to ideology in the Bush years,” she said. “He will not proceed through an ideological frame and seek to impose that frame on every challenge.

Some Eurpoean countries have elected leaders more center-right and are kind of on the same page as President Bush. Maybe an “Obama administration” will be out of touch with Europe…?

“There is some truth to the notion that some of the animus at the popular level towards the Bush administration may have made it easier for some of our European partners to avoid taking steps that we may want them to take and that perhaps they ought to take,” she said.

“That has, in some respects, perhaps on some issues, given them an easy out. Barack Obama will lead from a position of strength and seek progress, and he will want to work with Europe in very strong partnership.

“It means we in the United States will have to do our part; but Europe will have to do its part too. There can be no free riders if this is going to be an effective partnership.”

Obviously Ms. Rice has forgotten the European tradition of sitting out conflicts until they arrive at their doorstep.

But this is yet another example of a campaign that’s so absorbed with it’s own biased, fawning press, that an aide (one of hundreds) believes she, on behalf of a nation she does not yet represent, dictate terms to a dozen nations prior to a campaign tour they invited themselves to.

The audacity continues.

(Bob Parks)