Nobel Peace Prize for Obama - A Bit Premature?

I was very surprised to read the news of President Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize. So surprised that I at first thought it was an elaborate April Fool's joke (of course it's October, but still).

Now readers of my blog know that I greatly respect and admire the man, so I don't grudge him the prize at all. I believe that by the time he completes his two terms (which he should if all goes well), he would have achieved enough to deserve the award twice or thrice over.

However, he hasn't really achieved anything yet. All we have so far is hope, because he has made a good start on many fronts. He has adopted a more conciliatory, less arrogant tone in public discourse. He treats even his adversaries with respect and tries to win bipartisan support for his initiatives. US foreign policy has suddenly begun to appear almost benign after decades of being a bag of dirty tricks for the rest of the world. And his personal style is magnetic and charming. No one but the most die-hard Republican/Conservative can fail to be impressed. But it's still only a good start. The results aren't in yet.

I think the Nobel Prize Committee jumped the gun. They really should have waited. This year's prize should have gone to the various relief agencies that pitched in to help victims of natural disasters around the globe. That would have been a more timely recognition of valuable work going on right now. What will the committee do after a few years, when Obama actually achieves some tangible outcomes? Award him a second prize?

In short, I don't think Obama's Nobel is undeserved, just premature.

[The Taliban have criticised the award to Obama. That settles it for me. Now I'm fully convinced he deserves it :-).]

Obama's "Gaffes" - The Truth and Nothing But the Truth

Conventional wisdom holds that Obama made two major gaffes during his long presidential campaign. The first was during the Democratic primaries when he remarked at a private dinner that many poor whites in Pennsylvania were bitter and clung to guns and religion. Hillary Clinton pounced on him for that bit of political incorrectness and attempted to squeeze every bit of mileage she could from it (not very much, as it turned out). Then, towards the end of the campaign, there was his comment to Joe the Plumber that "spreading the wealth around" was a desirable thing in the current circumstances, a comment that was promptly seized upon by the Republicans to proclaim Obama a socialist.

Now that the election is safely over, and far from the heat and dust of US politics, I have to wonder what Obama said that was so wrong.

Do uneducated poor whites in the Appalachian region bitterly cling to guns and religion? Sweet Jesus, that's God's own truth, so shoot me.

Perhaps as Jack Nicholson's Colonel Jessep suggested in A Few Good Men, Americans can't handle the truth...?

And wouldn't spreading the wealth around just be the opposite of George Bush's policy of concentrating wealth in the hands of a few? That hasn't exactly been the best policy as current events have shown, so why the fuss?

I think it would be far better to suffix the word "socialist" every time it's used with the Seinfeldian phrase, "not that there's anything wrong with that."

(My idea of Utopia isn't socialism (not that there's anything wrong with that) and neither is it laissez-faire capitalism, but if we cannot have competitive markets to spread the wealth around in a capitalistically acceptable way, then perhaps a little fiscal spreading through progressive taxation is the way to go.)

After the election, Obama made another "gaffe". He said he wouldn't hold séances to contact dead presidents like Nancy Reagan did. That was untrue only in a literal sense. In spirit (pun intended), it was a fair comment since Nancy Reagan was known to consult astrologers.

All in all, I think I like Obama's gaffes better than his trite statements. They have the clear ring of truth. Keep them coming, Mr. President!

The Smartest US President

Barack Obama's impressive résumé and obvious intelligence have the world in raptures, but there was at least one President before him who could give him a run for his money in the intellectual department.

That President was Thomas Jefferson, horticulturist, statesman, architect, archaeologist, paleontologist, author, inventor, and founder of the University of Virginia (source: Wikipedia). Rather than reference the tons of material written by and about Jefferson, I will only quote one example of his many prescient words:

I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all their property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.

Beat that, Barack Obama. Jefferson predicted the current mess in 1802. (And yes, the Fed is a private organisation, not owned or controlled by the US government.)

No wonder Kennedy said when welcoming a group of 49 Nobel laureates to the White House that it was "the most extraordinary collection of talent and human knowledge that has ever been gathered together at the White House - with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."

Ich bin ein Amerikaner

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Change has indeed come to America. And what momentous change!

Take your eyes off Barack Obama for a minute to see the greater wonder. Michelle Obama enters the White House as First Lady of the country that enslaved her ancestors. Now that is poetic. None of Barack's ancestors was ever a slave. It is in Michelle Obama that I see the wheel of history come full circle.

Still, the world has reached but one milestone. We rejoice that a black (or as my pedantic mind would interject, "half-black, half-white") person has won the recognition he deserves for his talent and potential without regard to his race. That is a triumph of American meritocracy. The next milestone for our collective civilisation will be when such an achievement does not evoke comment.

Personally, my opinion of the US has now soared. Having always looked at the US from outside, I would say it was US foreign policy that has had the greatest influence on my opinion. Specifically, as an Indian growing up in India during the seventies and eighties, resentment was my uppermost feeling whenever I thought of the US. US foreign policy never practised what it preached. It preached democracy and human rights. Yet when asked to choose between democratic India and authoritarian Pakistan, the US always came down on the side of Pakistan. Repeated evidence of Pakistan's sponsorship of terrorism in Kashmir and elsewhere in India was ignored by successive American administrations. In particular, Nixon's shameful partisanship during the 1971 Bangladesh war will remain forever in my mind, and I could not help but feel glee at his subsequent ignominous departure from public life. If I was religious, I would call it karma.

It has only been in recent times (i.e., during the Clinton adminstration) that India has received more favourable treatment compared to its troublesome neighbour. And that's not so much because the US finally saw the error of its ways but because India became economically so much more important. Barack Obama too understands where the threat to peace comes from today. He is the highest-profile American to have talked about possible military action against Pakistan to root out terrorism. One more example of his clear thinking if one was needed. At last, an American President who sees what only Indians could see so far.

Regional politics aside, Obama's election now robs every dictatorship around the world of its last remaining excuses. I remember eighties-era Soviet propaganda and its boast - that it was easier for the descendent of a Russian serf to achieve high office in the USSR than it was for the descendent of an African slave to become a governor or the President of the US. Now, a truly liberal American populace has shown the lie to that sort of thinking. As recently as a couple of months ago, people around the world were muttering that American racism was alive and well, that American voters would never "allow" a black person to become President.

America retorted: Yes, we can. Just watch us.

And the world watched, mouth agape.

I have always resented it when Americans referred to their country as "the greatest nation on Earth." Today, I'll swallow that resentment and grant them the right to say that. As Obama said in his victory speech in Chicago, "the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope."

Meritocracy matters. At least two generations of talented Indians have left India's shores for the US. "Opportunity" is the word most often used to explain their decision to migrate, but what provides opportunity is the undiscriminating meritocracy of American society. You perform, you are rewarded. No wonder Indians are known as the most successful ethnic minority in the US. The entrepreneurial Indian provides the seed, and the meritocratic American environment provides the fertile soil for that seed to become the biggest tree it possibly can. Reportedly, 40% of Silicon Valley's startups have Indian owners. So many Indian names feature in the senior executive level of the American corporate world and in the faculty lists of the Ivy League. In contrast, India's own soil has been sadly barren for several decades, and native seeds could never grow into such tall trees in that soil.

The challenge that Barack Obama's election poses to India is different from the challenge that it poses to many other countries. India is already a democracy with an equally impressive record of righting historical wrongs and empowering its historically disadvantaged minorities. Next year's Indian elections may see the elevation of a Dalit ("untouchable") woman to the highest office in the land. That will be doubly impressive for a society that has historically been both patriarchal and caste-ridden. No, the challenge for India from Obama's election is to develop as an equally visible meritocracy. Can India provide opportunity to all, regardless of personal background? Affirmative action is hugely effective in India in churning and inverting the social pyramid, but it is also hugely controversial and creates its own pockets of unfairness. There is also entrenched unfairness and bigotry in the Indian populace at large of the kind that Americans were so recently accused of. As an example, the leader of the party that formed the current Indian government was effectively denied the Prime Ministership in spite of her Indian citizenship because she was born Italian. Even educated Indians wrote emphatic comments on blogs swearing that they would never accept her as PM. Welcome to racism, Indian-style. India needs to answer the American challenge - Can a white person become prime minister of India? Because meritocracy counts, and change starts at the top (or at the bottom, if you're talking about the mind of an individual).

We will definitely see this election reverberate throughout the world. Obama's greatest handicap now is the weight of expectations that he carries. No one expects that he will sell out US interests in a naive internationalist spirit. He will first and foremost safeguard US interests. If he can see (in a way that past US administrations could not) that US interests are best served by supporting a network of true democracies around the world rather than by propping up acquiescent dictators, he would have achieved a win-win situation for all of us.

I also cynically hope he will renege on his protectionist election promises. Protectionism always harms those it is meant to protect, so I'm hoping he will prove to be as pragmatic (on trade) as he was when he rejected campaign financing after initially pledging support for it.

Great Ad, and Great Advice

Apparently, this ad saying "Let the issues be the issue" is running in Manhattan on the eve of the US election. It dramatically shows a white Barack Obama and an African-American John McCain. It's a great idea, just imagining how race could be factored out of the election so that voters could concentrate on the really important issues.



Why didn't they do this earlier, and why only in Manhattan?

Liberal or Conservative, the same rules apply

All this partisan talk from the right about Barack Obama being a "socialist" who wants to "spread the wealth around" ignores some basic commonsense principles. I don't believe the ground rules change whether a government is "liberal" or "conservative". And this is nothing specific to the US. It applies equally to any country.

Advice to the liberals:

Tax and spend all you want, but maintain a balanced budget. Don't spend more than you can earn.

Advice to the conservatives:

Cut taxes and cut spending all you want, but maintain a balanced budget. Don't give up more in tax cuts than you give up in spending.

Fiscal responsibility is the watchword. You could call it "true conservatism" if you want. I'm a true fiscal conservative, because I abhor budget deficits. They borrow from the future, provoke inflation and reduce our future wealth.

(Somehow, I think Barack Obama will be fiscally conservative, not irresponsible. It will of course take any future US administration years to recover from the trillion dollar deficit created by George W Bush, but I believe Obama will make things better, not worse.)

US Election - My Prediction

Less than two weeks to the US election! It's no big deal predicting that Obama is going to win. Everyone's saying that. The real deal is in predicting the margin. I think it'll be an absolute landslide. Obama will pick up more than 400 votes out of 538.

(Here's my reasoning. As of 24-25 October, ABC's electoral map gives Obama 311 votes to McCain's 163, with 64 being too close to call. I believe the states that are labelled 'moderate Republican', 'marginal Republican' or 'too close to call' will gradually be won over by Obama before election day, so I've counted only the electoral votes of strongly Republican or very strongly Republican states in favour of McCain. That only yields a total of 134 votes for McCain, leaving 404 for Obama. See map and table below.)



And why do I think the moderate Republican states will ultimately swing to Obama? Many reasons - Colin Powell's endorsement, Sarah Palin's un-hockey mom wardrobe that should speak louder than her pro-American rhetoric to undecided voters, the lingering fears of an economic collapse and a recession that alienate voters further from the Republicans whose cronies and appointees are perceived as having caused the whole mess, attacks on President Bush by McCain and Palin (!) that may put some Republican voters off voting altogether, my expectations of a high voter turnout that's usually a good sign for the Democrats, and my belief that there is a 'reverse Bradley effect' at work that prevents many people in conservative neighbourhoods from openly backing Obama in opinion polls, understating his actual support.

We've seen a generation of "Reagan Democrats". Welcome to the Obama Republicans. I believe they're called Obamicans.

One more reason to vote for Obama

Well, Obama's locked up the geek vote, at any rate.

When visiting Google's headquarters last year, he was reportedly asked a question that would have stumped even a few techos: "What's the most efficient way to sort a million 32-bit integers?"

In the thoughtful, deliberate way we've come to admire so much, the Democratic candidate answered that he thought the bubble sort would be the wrong way to go. I'm sure he'll arrive at the correct algorithm with the help of his advisers, but it's good to know that his instincts were correct, as always. And there's at least one country that he could be President of in a heartbeat.

It could be disastrous to elect a person with a poor sorting policy, especially in these difficult economic times when we can't afford to waste resources. I'm told McCain couldn't answer the same question when he visited the Google campus a few months earlier. And I'm sure Sarah Palin's answer would have involved stacking the numbers as far right as they'd go...

The Effect of Race in the US Presidential Election

I like to think I'm post-racial, and I also like to think the US election has progressed beyond considerations of race. But this comment by Realista over at Boston.com has startled me into understanding just how potent a factor race still is.

Essentially, it's a set of hypothetical questions - what if certain characteristics of Sen. Obama and his Republican opposite numbers (McCain and Palin) had been switched around? Would people still look at the two candidates the same way?

I'm going to repeat those questions verbatim here, because they're so hard-hitting:

What if the Obamas had paraded five children across the stage, including a three month old infant and an unwed, pregnant teenage daughter?

What if John McCain was a former president of the Harvard Law Review?

What if Barack Obama finished fifth from the bottom of his graduating class?

What if McCain had only married once and Obama was a divorcee?

What if Obama was the candidate who left his first wife after a severe disfiguring car accident, when she no longer measured up to his standards?

What if Obama had met his second wife in a bar and had a long affair while he was still married?

What if Michelle Obama was the wife who not only became addicted to pain killers but also acquired them illegally through her charitable organization?

What if Cindy McCain graduated from Harvard?

What if Obama had been a member of the Keating Five? (The Keating Five were five United States Senators accused of corruption in 1989, igniting a major political scandal as part of the larger Savings and Loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s.)

What if McCain was a charismatic, eloquent speaker?

What if Obama couldn’t read from a teleprompter?

What if Obama was the one who had military experience that included discipline problems and a record of crashing seven planes? (My note: I understand it was 3 planes, not 7)

What if Obama was the one who was known to display publicly, on many occasions, a serious anger management problem?

What if Michelle Obama’s family had made their money first bootlegging, then from beer distribution?

What if the Obamas had adopted a white child?

Amazing, isn't it? Any or a small set of the negative aspects of McCain/Palin might have ended Obama's candidacy prematurely if they had been his flaws. Conversely, any of the positive things about Obama might have been trumpeted far more loudly had it applied to McCain/Palin.

What's often said about women (i.e., that they have to work twice as hard as a man to get the same recognition) may also apply to minorities.

I'm afraid we're still in Kansas, Toto.

Sarah Palin - On Second Thoughts...

My first reaction when I read about Sarah Palin's selection as McCain's running mate was cynicism. I felt it was an unabashedly sexist move by the Republican campaign, essentially calling across to disenchanted Democratic women voters, "Don't cry over Hillary, we've got a woman here now. Vote for us!"

I've since read a bit more about Gov. Palin, and I feel a grudging admiration. Even factoring out the sexist manipulation, John McCain probably couldn't have done better in his choice. The Alaskan governor seems the genuine article, all right. She's the maverick that McCain only pretends to be, and her short track record as Governor already shows that she goes after results without caring for the party establishment or cosy arrangements between power-brokers.

I'm ambivalent on abortion, as I've said before. I think abortion is a bad thing but I also believe it shouldn't be made illegal (because that'll only drive it underground, which is worse). Gov. Palin is a conservative and opposes abortion. Unlike many others who merely talk the talk, she and her husband have been in the extremely painful situation of having had to make the choice when their unborn child was diagnosed with Down's Syndrome. They stuck to their principles and had the baby. It's not for us to argue the wisdom of their decision. What it says to me is that she walks the talk.

Another son of hers is to serve in Iraq soon, which bolsters her patriotic credentials. That should stand in contrast to others in her party who avoided serving in Vietnam. Again, we can debate the wisdom of the war itself, but no fingers can be pointed at Gov. Palin on the grounds of keeping her own family safe while others' kids are sent off to fight.

The only thing that repels me personally is her lifetime membership of the National Rifle Association. Alignment with the gun lobby to me suggests a fundamental flaw in one's approach to life. A president with that trait may perhaps be just that bit more willing to choose a military option over a diplomatic one. After 8 years of adventurism springing from precisely such an approach to life, can the world afford any more?

But for better or worse, she's here now, and Obama-Biden have a real fight on their hands. This is shaping up to be the most exciting US election in recent times. At a time when Obama has been softening his message to appeal to the centre, McCain has revolutionised his campaign by importing a true maverick (i.e., not necessarily one who goes against Conservative dogma but one who ignores the political establishment of the day and its backroom deals, which takes a lot of courage). If anything should happen to old man McCain after a possible Republican victory, she'll be the one minding the store. From what I've read of her so far, she wouldn't hesitate to demolish the Bush legacy.

Perhaps (dare one say it?), Sarah Palin is now the one who represents change we can believe in?

Update (Oct 2008): I still admire Sarah Palin for her remarkable personal qualities of toughness, strong will and high achievement, but after watching her performance over the past few weeks, I also think she's a fruitcake. She's a right-wing religious nut who believes that a pastor's prayers cleared the way for her election to the governor's office in Alaska. She reminds me of the paranoid Brigadier in Dr. Strangelove who had weird beliefs in vital essences and held onto conspiracy theories about fluoridated water. I wouldn't at all be comfortable with her sitting in the White House with her finger on the 'nucular' trigger. Who knows what God would tell her to do?

Obama's Right - The US Should Lose its Militaristic Mindset

"I don't want to just end the war. I want to change the mindset that got us into this war in the first place."

Breathtaking words. Spoken by Barack Obama. I think I said before that Barack Obama doesn't need "detail" when he talks about change. His vision is so broad, so far ahead of the rest of the field, he has the potential to transform the US and the world. Details can be worked out in time. But if you don't have vision, your mastery of detail qualifies you to be nothing more than an accountant, certainly not the next President of the US.

Of course, talk about changing the American militaristic mindset probably resonates so well because it just hasn't delivered. A superpower, and every time it goes to war on its own against a small country, it gets its nose bloodied. Most embarrassing. Yes, time to change that mindset. It's making the US the laughing stock of the world. To paraphrase Pyrrhus, one more Vietnam or Iraq and the US will be finished as a world power, with smaller countries going into convulsions of laughter whenever the Seventh Fleet sails into view. ("Hit me, hit me! Ha, ha, ha!")

Less dramatically than Vietnam or Iraq, has aggressive US support for pliant military dictators won it anything?

They supported Batista in Cuba. It's been staunchly communist ever since.
They supported Somoza in Nicaragua. Nicaragua went on to elect a communist government.
They supported the Shah of Iran. Iran is now part of the 'Axis of Evil', seemingly lost to the US forever.
They supported dictator after dictator in Pakistan. Pakistan is now a "front-line state in the war on terror", but it's not very clear on which side of that line it sits.
They supported Marcos in the Philippines. They lost Clark airbase and Subic Bay naval base when a more independent government came to power.

You can surround yourself with weapons, but that won't buy you security. You will be far more secure if you just surround yourself with friends. That holds just as true at the level of the individual American (who doesn't realise that the Second Amendment has probably caused more deaths than all their wars combined) as it does at the level of the US vis-à-vis other countries.

My word of advice to US policy makers: Stop thinking that countries that disagree with you are your enemies. France, for instance, will disagree with you at every turn, but will never do you harm. Your dictatorship friends, on the other hand, will never say a word to displease you, but when the dictator inevitably goes, you will find a bitter enemy in his place.

Super Tuesday is nigh, and it remains to be seen if Obama's latest visionary gem will win him the votes required to clinch the Democratic nomination. And if he wins in November and carries through on his promises, the world may finally drop the 'hate' part of its love-hate relationship with the US.

Barack Obama and "Change" - Does He Really Lack Detail?

There's been a lot of newsprint devoted lately to how Barack Obama lacks detail when talking about the "change" that he will bring about. A lot of that criticism comes from the campaign office of Hillary Clinton, of whom I've written before (Hi, Mom!). Mom, of course, has all the details required to make change happen, right at her fingertips.

But she, and all the analysts, are missing a very important part of why Barack Obama does not need to spell out how he's going to bring about change. Barack Obama is the change. People everywhere see it, and people everywhere will treat him differently, setting aside their own prejudices of what an American president is, giving him a fresh hearing, being willing to listen to what he says and even doing what he requests them to do. That's significant.

I'm approaching this very personally and viscerally, just as with my earlier analysis of Hillary Clinton. I can put Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, George Bush (both father and son), and any number of previous US presidents in the same mental box, regardless of party affiliation. But I cannot put Barack Obama in the same box. He doesn't belong! I never realised that ethnicity could play such an important part in perception. Much as I want to be colour-blind, I find I cannot.

Barack Obama is clearly not part of the US political establishment traditionally dominated by middle-aged white men. As any brand consultant will tell you, that positions him differently. The brand equity of the US political establishment is entirely negative (remember Truman's "If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog"?) Obama's involuntary positioning benefits him a great deal, not only in the US, but more importantly, in the rest of the world.

I'm aware of my thought processes, and I can't be alone in this:

Barack Obama => not middle-aged white man
Not middle-aged white man => not part of traditional US political establishment
Not part of traditional US political establishment => good guy

Barack Obama is a good guy. Whoever I am, my defenses are down. I am disarmed.

So now if a President Barack Hussein Obama sits down with leaders in the Middle East and puts together a peace treaty, there's likely to be far greater buy-in than if another middle-aged white man in that role does the same thing. His appearance, and his name, promise a far greater chance at peace than the details of the accord.

Another area where I predict he would have immense influence is in India-Pakistan relations. Indian leaders don't trust the US because of its past (and continuing) history as an ally of Pakistan. Paradoxically, Pakistanis don't seem to trust the US either, because it hasn't been a reliable ally (Example: Ignoring India's protests, the US sold F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan. Then they took payment but refused to deliver the jets because of nuclear concerns. They didn't refund the money either. Some ally. The Indians chuckled but somehow didn't see this as reason to start trusting the US.)

The current US ability to broker a peace deal between India and Pakistan is virtually zero, and it has everything to do with credibility. But enter a president with none of that historical baggage, and everything changes.

The solution to the India-Pakistan logjam is simple and stares everyone in the face, but has no chance of implementation in the current political climate. It's about accepting the status quo in Kashmir and then moving on with development, trade and all-round progress. India will never give up the part of Kashmir that it controls, and neither will Pakistan give up the other. This situation has remained static for decades. For a solution to the impasse, no real exchange of territory need actually take place. All that is required is for each party to admit publicly that they are not going to get "back" any territory from the other.

I will wager that if a certain President Barack Obama drops by in 2009 and gets the leaders of India and Pakistan to sign an accord that recognises this reality, the people of both countries will accept it. I'm not talking about the lunatic or fanatic fringe on either side. They can never be won over. It's the common people who will accept the bona fides and huge perceived moral authority of this different US President and do what he asks.

Once again, the clincher will not be in the details. It will be the person.

Hillary Clinton cannot pull this off. A white woman will not command any more authority than a white man, and in the subcontinent, may even command less, sad to say. No amount of mastery of detail will help when it comes to influencing people.

It's not what you know, it's who you are.

Barack Obama is The Man.