Last Friday, I completed my last course in my university degree. It was a politics course called "US Hegemony in International Law". When I started the course in August, I was immediately saddened at how the Bush administration had pissed on international legal agreements and twisted the meaning of Freedom. Perhaps ironically, by the end of the course your financial system had melted down. The discussion had moved on to whether America - in the light of financial crisis - still had any of that hegemony left.
I am not an American. I am Australian. I have never traveled to your country. But I know that this election effects me as well. The choice you are about to make is perhaps the most important one in the past four decades - not just in terms of America's image, but in terms of the real effects that American foreign policy has towards other people around the world.
If the world could vote, here's what some of us would say.
My first memory of ever seeing George W Bush was when a clip of him was played on Australian television either just before or just after the 2000 Presidential election. Some of you might remember it. It's that famous clip of him being interviewed, and the interviewer is asking him some basic questions about current events and world leaders, and he had absolutely no clue about the answers. Some of them even I knew - and I was Fifteen.
I was sitting with my family at my grandparent's house at the time that I watched this clip. All of us just rolled our eyes. My grandfather piped up and said "oh god, not another dumb Texan President with 'swagger'. We already had Johnson." We all watched the shenanigans of the supreme court decision and we weren't happy. To say that George W Bush made a bad first impression on the rest of the world would be an understatement. It just seemed baffling to me that you guys could put such a smart guy like Bill Clinton in the White House and then follow it up with such a complete moron.
Much of the world came to the immediate conclusion that George W Bush was a complete fool. Sadly, it took a majority of Americans slightly longer to come to the same conclusion. I remember during the Clinton years that America was treated seriously and was respected, and in some parts of the world even loved. Australians really loved Bill Clinton. Whenever a picture of the white house came on TV, you knew it was the centre of the so-called "free world". Although the Monica Lewinsky scandal made news here, we couldn't quite understand why Bill Clinton would get impeached for such a trivial issue. Who cares about the private lives of politicians. I was thirteen when that scandal first made headlines - to me it paled in significance to what the Clinton Administration was doing about Iraq and Kosovo. Yet for some reason it dominated the news.
Over the past few months I've been asking many of my friends and family about their views on the US Election. In particular, after reading the "Roosevelt with a suntan" journal, I was interested in the views of my own oldest relatives. I am lucky enough to still have three living grandparents. Neither of my grandfathers have ever been short of an opinion. Both are outspokenly progressive.
On my mum's side of the family, I asked my grandfather about the US election. He was a proud public servant - a teacher, a scholar, lover of the Classics, a High School Headmaster for nearly 15 years. He lived through the depression in the hardest of circumstances - his father lost his legs in an accident while working on the railways. He and his brother, and his mother, had to go out and scrape together an income.
I asked him about the US Election. He said that he thought Obama was going to win. Then I asked him about George W Bush. His answer sums it up better than any answer I have ever heard. He replied:
George Bush combines the corruption of Nixon, the ideological craziness of Reagan, the incompetence of Hoover and the Texan warmongering of Johnson. He is the worst president America has ever had.
Fairly straight forward.
On my dad's side of the family, my 87-year old grandfather has always been willing to volunteer an opinion about the failures of the United States. He grew up during the depression on a farm in the Queensland outback. He's a WW2 veteran who served on Anti-Aircraft guns in PNG. He's seen war. He is now a pacifist and a self described devout Catholic Socialist. He's also probably one of the few people I know who genuinely has anti-American beliefs (although never against the American people, just their government and their version of capitalism).
He blames America for the great depression (he lived through it), he hated Truman for dropping the A-Bomb, and he told me he thought America had gone permanently downhill "after they killed Kennedy". Somewhat carefully, I asked him the whether he admired any American President. He said yes. I was expecting him to say that his favourite president was Kennedy (for his Catholicism), but much to my surprise, the person he named was Bill Clinton. I was stunned, since he had lived through many great leaders - but that was his answer. Bill Clinton. And the reason he gave?
"Because Clinton was the first president in my lifetime who genuinely and actively worked for world peace, while also taking care of his own people".
That really floored me and made me think. It also made me even more sad at how things have gone over the past eight years. That's not a quote anyone could utter about the America of George W Bush. On every major issue relevant to international relations, from the use of military force, torture, poverty, genocide, human rights, climate change, terrorism, Israel and Palestine, and now the world economy, Bush has completely and utterly failed - not just the world, but also his own people.
Now, I don't want to get too rosy eyed here, Clinton wasn't perfect. But unlike Bush, the Clinton administration actually gave a damn and was willing to engage on most of these issues and try to do something about it. Clinton was an internationalist. And more to the point, Bill Clinton actually gave half a crap about his own people, especially in the treatment of minorities. Contrast that with Hurricane Katrina. I don't think I need to tell you guys how utterly embarrassing that was for your country's image abroad. That, perhaps more than anything, demonstrated your country's ineptitude - your government can blow things up overseas, but it can't save impoverished black people from drowning in New Orleans. Apologies if that comment might sound incendiary, but that is merely a reflection of commonly held views overseas.
I hope you guys realise how important this election is for the world. You may not realise just how deep the feeling runs - this is quite easily the most watched US election in history. In Australia, we tossed out our conservative government in an election nearly one year ago. The current US election is getting just as much, if not more coverage on our television screens, than our own election. I am told by my friends on exchange that it is dominating news in the UK and Europe. There's a reason for this. Who you pick matters to all of us a great deal. It matters to my country a great deal. Australia has a free trade agreement, an official alliance, and a defence strategy that relies on The US. We have both poverty and incredible economic growth in our immediate region, as well as crippling droughts caused by climate change. We had a few of our own citizens trapped in Guantanamo Bay. We pulled troops out of Iraq last year and we still have troops in Afghanistan.
And now of course, we have a financial crisis caused by the irresponsibility of your investment banks, the inadequacy of your banking regulations, and stupidity of Republican Party ideology.
This has effected some of my friends personally. Earlier this year a friend of mine - fresh out of uni, wanted to go into investment banking. He applied for 2009 graduate jobs at Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs. He got accepted into both, but picked Goldman's. Now he is praying that they don't go under, too, otherwise he's going to have to find a new career path.
The reason why everyone abroad cares so much about what's about to happen, is that we are sick and tired of dealing with an America that refuses to engage seriously in tackling the big issues of the day. Unlike my grandfather, it gives me absolutely no joy to be bashing America all the time. I just want problems solved. There's reason why the world continually looks to America - it's because America, however flawed, still has the greatest capacity of any other nation to do good for the most amount of people on this planet, if it so chooses. Sadly, your political leaders have not made the right choices over the past couple of decades. In particular, the Republican Party have proved to me, over the past four years of me actively watching, that their ideology and their current base renders them incapable of the leadership that the world requires.
All of my friends are watching this election, even the ones with limited political interest, because we know and feel like this is the big one. Many have wished to be able to vote in your election, and I'll confess that I am one of them. A number of my friends are US citizens - permanent residents as well as students on exchange. They are all voting this year - and all of them are voting for the same guy.
That guy is Barack Obama.
Please don't crush our hope.